Lead Data Scientist

Our Purpose

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

Title and Summary

Lead Data Scientist

Mastercard is a global technology company in the payments industry. Our mission is to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart, and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their greatest potential.

Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. With connections across more than 210 countries and territories, we are building a sustainable world that unlocks priceless possibilities for all.

Services within Mastercard is responsible for acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers by managing fraud and risk, enhancing cybersecurity, and improving the digital payments experience. We provide value-added services and leverage expertise, data-driven insights, and execution.

Overview
The Security Solutions Data Science team is responsible for creating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models backing its flagship product. The models generated are production ready and created to back specific products in Mastercard’s authorization and authentication networks. The Data Science team is also responsible for developing automated processes for creating models covering all modeling steps, from data extraction up to delivery. In addition, the processes must be designed to scale, to be repeatable, resilient, and industrialized.

You will be joining a team of Data Scientists and engineers working on innovative AI and ML fraud detection. Our innovative cross-channel AI solutions are applied in Fortune 500 companies in industries such as fin-tech and banking. We are pursuing a highly motivated individual with strong problem-solving skills to take on the challenge of structuring and engineering data and cutting-edge AI model evaluation and reporting processes.

Role
As a Lead Data Scientist, you will:
• Work closely with the business owners to understand business requirements, performance metrics regarding data quality and model performance of customer facing products.
• Lead the development of advancing fraud detection models specifically credit and debit card transaction level models.
• Lead the efforts to enhance the best modeling practices that maintains the competitiveness of our fraud detection models.
• Oversee implementation of data and model development pipelines.
• Explore fraudulent patterns or trends for feature discovery and enhance fraud detection model performance.
• Manage the testing of trained models to ensure their robustness and assess their readiness for deployment.


All About You

Essential Skills:
• Graduate degree in CS, Data Science, Statistics, Machine Learning, AI or a related STEM field.
• Demonstrated ability to independently contribute to overall team objectives.
• Strong background in statistics, probability, and linear algebra as applied to machine learning models.
• Data science and data engineering experience
• Proven experience with supervised and unsupervised learning techniques, such as multiple of XGBoost/LightGBM/GBM, deep neural networks, Isolation Forest, and clustering.
• Strong grasp over data science and machine learning concepts.
• Experience with SQL language and one or multiple of PySpark, Hadoop, Impala, Hive.
• Good knowledge of Linux / Bash environment.
• Python, Pyspark.
• Knowledge of model optimization techniques.
• The ability to work closely with more senior data scientists implementing and optimizing models within big data pipelines.
• Good communication skills.
• Highly skilled problem solver.
• Exhibits a high degree of initiative.

Nice to have:
• Experience building payment fraud detection models.
• PhD in CS, Statistics, or a related quantitative STEM field.
• Experience with data engineering in PySpark on petabyte scale data.
• Expertise in timeseries analysis and forecasting techniques, such as ARIMA, RNN, and LSTM networks to detect anomalies in large-scale, time-sensitive datasets.
• Experience with active learning methods, particularly in situations where labeled data is scarce or expensive to obtain.
• Understanding of data privacy, algorithm bias, and developing fair, transparent, and accountable algorithms.
• Understands and implements methods to evaluate own work and others for error.
• Loves working with error-prone, messy, disparate, unstructured data.


Total Base Pay Range
138,000.00 - 221,000.00 USD Annual

Mastercard is a merit-based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role. In the US or Canada, if you require accommodations or assistance to complete the online application process or during the recruitment process, please contact reasonable_accommodation@mastercard.com and identify the type of accommodation or assistance you are requesting. Do not include any medical or health information in this email. The Reasonable Accommodations team will respond to your email promptly.

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;

• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;

• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and

• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.

In line with Mastercard’s total compensation philosophy and assuming that the job will be performed in the US, the successful candidate will be offered a competitive base salary based on location, experience and other qualifications for the role and may be eligible for an annual bonus or commissions depending on the role. Mastercard benefits for full time (and certain part time) employees generally include: insurance (including medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance), flexible spending account and health savings account, paid leaves (including 16 weeks new parent leave, up to 20 paid days bereavement leave), 10 annual paid sick days, 10 or more annual paid vacation days based on level, 5 personal days, 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays, 401k with a best-in-class company match, deferred compensation for eligible roles, fitness reimbursement or on-site fitness facilities, eligibility for tuition reimbursement, gender-inclusive benefits and many more.

Pay Ranges

O'Fallon, Missouri: $138,000 - $221,000 USD