Staff Data Scientist, Grant

Kikoff•San Francisco, CA

13d•$265,000 - $306,000

About The Position

Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company focused on empowering financial security. Grant is Kikoff's fastest-growing business line, specializing in earned wage access (EWA) and expanding into new products. The Grant data science team is responsible for ensuring product success through clear promises, reliable delivery, and a healthy business model. This role involves leading data work for a specific product area within Grant, contributing to Grant-wide strategy, and setting technical direction and best practices for data science across Kikoff, including the integration of AI agents into the analytical workflow.

Requirements

Experience partnering with product, engineering, and marketing peers across strategy, goal setting, approach, and execution.
A track record of defining metrics from scratch and getting a team to run on them.
Experience designing and running experimentation programs, including changes where clean randomization wasn't available.
Comfort with quasi-experimental and causal inference methods, and clarity about their limits.
Hands-on with production-quality SQL and Python, including building pipelines, analyses, and models.
Experience building or working closely with models that drive decisions in a product (e.g., ranking, fraud, forecasting, personalization, underwriting, detection).
Experience using AI tools as a core part of daily analytical work, demonstrating impact on speed and quality.
Ability to drive decisions with data in front of executive audiences, including when data does not support the plan.

Nice To Haves

Consumer fintech experience, especially with products for un- and under-banked customers.
Experience building an experimentation or causal inference practice in an organization that lacked one.
Experience taking a model from proof of concept to production, or shipping test and challenger models that influenced product decisions.
Prior staff or tech-lead scope, including setting direction for other individual contributors and owning a domain's data strategy.
8+ years in data science or analytics.

Responsibilities

Lead the data work for a Grant product area, including setting questions, building evidence, and driving next steps.
Define and maintain the measurement system for a product area (acquisition, activation, usage, repayment, losses, unit economics).
Contribute to the Grant-wide measurement framework.
Own product experimentation for the assigned area, including design, guardrails, analysis, and recommendations for rollouts and policy changes.
Build and evaluate models where appropriate, including proof-of-concept and challenger models, offline evaluation, and production monitoring.
Partner with Grant's business lead and area leads on roadmap and objectives.
Contribute to technical direction and best practices for data science across Kikoff, including experimentation, AI tooling, and work review.
Help define how the team works as AI agents become a core part of the analysis loop.