Staff Data Scientist – Credit Strategy

Job Title: Staff Data Scientist – Credit Strategy Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) Job Overview The Staff Data Scientist – Credit Strategy is a key member of the Risk Management team responsible for designing, deploying, and optimizing end-to-end credit strategies that balance growth, profitability, and credit risk. This role plays a critical part in maximizing credit conversion and customer lifetime value while ensuring portfolio performance remains within established loss tolerances. The position works closely with Risk Leadership, Manual Underwriting, Product, Engineering, and Data Science teams to build scalable, data-driven credit strategies that support sustainable growth and resilient portfolio construction. Key Responsibilities • Design and deploy innovative approval, qualification, and segmentation strategies that maximize application approval rates while maintaining credit loss targets. • Develop and maintain underwriting policies defining minimum acceptance criteria and policy declines for segments outside the organization’s risk appetite. • Create statistically grounded credit limit assignment frameworks that optimize customer lifetime value while managing downside risk. • Design pricing and interest rate strategies, including experimentation and testing frameworks, to ensure strong borrower selection and adequate loss coverage. • Optimize data collection strategies by balancing information value against customer friction and operational costs. • Partner closely with the manual underwriting team to build hybrid risk frameworks that integrate analytical strategies with expert manual review. • Develop innovative credit strategy tooling to create differentiated credit pathways based on application profile, loan exposure, and underwriting complexity. • Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Data Science teams to design and deploy scalable infrastructure enabling rapid iteration of credit strategies. • Establish portfolio monitoring and reporting processes to track approval rates, credit performance, and risk metrics against expectations. • Apply forward-looking approaches to portfolio construction to ensure resilience across economic cycles and attractiveness to debt investors. • Incorporate macroeconomic trends and forward-looking risk signals into credit strategy decisions. Required Qualifications Experience • 8+ years of experience in commercial risk data science and credit strategy within fintech or banking environments. • 3–4 years of hands-on experience designing and managing credit strategies for Merchant Cash Advance (MCA) products (required). • Experience with model deployment, execution, and monitoring in production environments. • ML Ops experience preferred.