Senior Data Scientist - Validation & Information-Driven Trading

Location: Santa Monica, California, United States, New York, New York, United States

Department: AI/ML Scientists

Workplace: on_site

Employment Type: full

Description

The Organization

At TWG AI, we drive innovation and business transformation across a range of industries—including financial services, insurance, technology, media, and sports—by leveraging data and AI as core assets. Our AI-first, cloud-native approach delivers real-time intelligence and interactive business applications, empowering informed decision-making for both customers and employees. 

We prioritize responsible data and AI practices, ensuring ethical standards and regulatory compliance. Our decentralized structure enables each business unit to operate autonomously, supported by a central AI Solutions Group, while strategic partnerships with leading data and AI vendors fuel game-changing efforts in marketing, operations, and product development. 

You will collaborate with management to advance our data and analytics transformation, enhance productivity, and enable agile, data-driven decisions. By leveraging relationships with top tech startups and universities, you will help create competitive advantages and drive enterprise innovation. 

At TWG, your contributions will support our goal of sustained growth and superior returns, as we deliver rare value and impact across our businesses. 

The Role

As a Senior Data Scientist, own two things that make a regulated surveillance system credible: detecting information-driven trading, and proving the system actually works. The first is about timing — separating trading on public information from trading on non-public information, via the public-knowledge clock joined against pre-event positioning. On the US exchange this supports insider-trading detection at account grain; on the DeFi venue the same pipeline ports to wallet/cluster grain as behavioral pre-event positioning surveillance (deliberately without identity claims). The second is the assurance function a regulator-facing capability lives or dies on: rigorous, repeatable evidence that the detectors carry real signal rather than noise — now across two ground-truth regimes, including on-chain resolutions, which are public and deterministic. This is the most research-oriented of the seats and the closest to a quantitative-research profile. The second seat is junior and grows into the validation practice.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build detection logic for insider and information-driven trading, centered on the timing of when information became public versus when it was acted on — on both venues, with the identity boundary each venue supports
• Design and run rigorous validation of the systems' outputs — statistical testing, permutation-based informativeness testing against market-resolution ground truth, backtesting against known cases — to demonstrate the detectors work
• Own the quality and trustworthiness of the labels that train the models, treating labeling as a continuously improving process rather than a fixed dataset — including the DeFi label corpus, which the program creates from zero
• Grow the validation work into a repeatable, audit-ready assurance capability as the systems expand to new markets
• Mentor more junior team members contributing to the validation and analysis work

Requirements

Qualifications:

• Strong empirical and statistical background: hypothesis testing, permutation / resampling methods, backtesting, and careful inference
• Experience working with weak, noisy, or evolving labels and human-in-the-loop labeling systems
• A quantitative finance or empirical-research background (including relevant PhD or equivalent industry experience) a strong plus
• Sequential-modeling experience; transformers or RNNs applied to behavioral or transaction sequences is a plus
• Production ML experience and the discipline that comes with regulated, audit-facing work

Benefits

Position Location: 

This is an onsite position based out of our Santa Monica, CA or New York, NY offices.

Compensation: 

The base pay for this position is $190,000-290,000. A bonus will be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits.

TWG is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.