Staff Applied AI Scientist, Decision Systems

Team: Risk Management

Location: San Francisco, CA, San Diego, CA

Workplace Type: hybrid

Salary:

What You Will Work On

• Designing and formalizing structured AI reasoning frameworks that translate credit policy, risk strategy, and operational heuristics into production ready decision logic.
• Defining multi layer decision hierarchies across underwriting, collections, fraud detection, pricing optimization, and sales routing workflows, including conflict resolution logic when signals disagree.
• Establishing structured output standards for agent based systems so AI recommendations are interpretable, consistent, and actionable.
• Designing confidence scoring methodologies for AI assisted decisions and calibrating routing thresholds across auto approve, escalation, human review, and decline paths.
• Optimizing trade offs across risk exposure, approval rates, speed to decision, unit economics, and operational capacity.
• Analyzing override behavior and feedback loops to refine decision logic and improve system performance over time.
• Building evaluation datasets to test reasoning quality prior to deployment and defining clear production acceptance criteria.
• Benchmarking performance across decision domains and establishing monitoring standards to detect drift, degradation, bias, or inconsistency in AI outputs.
• Partnering with Engineering and MLOps to ensure monitoring, reporting, and feedback mechanisms are embedded in production systems.
• Supporting governance, audit, and compliance documentation to ensure decisions are explainable and defensible in a regulated environment.
• Assessing potential bias and unintended impact across workflows and partnering with Risk, Compliance, and Legal on responsible deployment.
• Quantifying business impact across loss rates, recovery performance, operational cost per file, funnel conversion, and cycle time, and aligning decision systems with portfolio economics and strategic objectives.

What This Role Is Not

• Ownership of API development, integration pipelines, or infrastructure.
• Primary responsibility for MLOps tooling or production orchestration code.
• An academic or purely research focused AI position.
• A general program management or governance only role disconnected from production impact.

What You Bring

• Eight or more years of experience in applied data science, including at least three years working on AI enabled product systems. Experience in AI product systems is required.
• Demonstrated experience designing, calibrating, and validating production decision systems.
• Experience translating domain expertise into structured logic frameworks that can be deployed in operational environments.
• Strong foundation in statistics, probability, and decision theory.
• Experience evaluating and tuning model outputs, including large language model reasoning outputs.
• Experience working in regulated or risk sensitive environments preferred. Background in fintech, lending, financial services, or other high consequence decision environments strongly preferred.
• Master’s degree in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Data Science, Economics, Computer Science, Engineering, or related quantitative discipline required. PhD preferred.

Why Join The Team

• This role offers the opportunity to shape how AI makes decisions across an entire lending platform.
• The work directly influences portfolio performance, unit economics, and operational strategy.
• You will operate in a company that is intentionally building AI into its core workflows, not experimenting at the margins.
• The systems you design will be durable, measurable, explainable, and central to the company’s long term competitive advantage.

We Offer

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with multiple plan options to support you and your family.
• A 401k retirement plan with company matching contributions to help you build long term financial security.
• Generous paid time off and paid holidays to support balance and flexibility.
• Company paid life insurance and disability coverage for additional protection and peace of mind.
• Flexible Spending Account and Health Savings Account options to maximize tax advantages.
• A Lifestyle Spending Account to support wellness and fitness related expenses.
• A professional development stipend to encourage continued learning and growth.
• An employee referral program that rewards you for helping us build a strong team.
• Company events and initiatives that foster collaboration, inclusion, and connection.