Senior Data Scientist
At a glance
Senior Data Science role at Circle. Remote, United States · full-time · $152,500–$205,000 base.
dataroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build and test fraud models for onboarding, logins, account changes and transfers, covering account takeover, scams and identity fraud
- Compare external risk signals with in-house models, then guide models from shadow testing into live use
- Set fraud labels and data needs with operations and engineering teams, capturing missed fraud as training examples
- Use holdout samples to measure missed fraud and wrongly blocked customers; track performance by customer segment
- Monitor fraud models, refresh them as needed, tune thresholds with strategy partners and assess AI review workflows
What you bring
- At least five years applying data science or machine learning to fraud, risk or financial crime
- Strong Python and SQL skills, with experience using XGBoost, LightGBM or a comparable modeling approach
- Experience handling sparse, delayed or biased labels, including cold starts, reject inference and chargeback delays
- Statistical strength in anomaly detection, network analysis, experimentation and threshold setting, plus production model experience
Who this fits
This senior role suits a data scientist who can take fraud models into production and work across technical and non-technical teams. It is listed as remote in San Francisco. The stated base salary range is $152,500 to $205,000 per year.
From the employer
Circle (NYSE: CRCL) is one of the world’s leading internet financial platform companies, building the foundation of a more open, global economy through digital assets, payment applications, and programmable blockchain infrastructure. Circle’s platform includes the world’s largest regulated stablecoin network anchored by USDC, Circle Payments Network for global money movement, and Arc, an enterprise-grade blockchain designed to become the Economic OS for the internet. Enterprises, financial institutions, and developers use Circle to power trusted, internet-scale financial innovation. Learn more at circle.com.
What you’ll be part of:
Circle is committed to visibility and stability in everything we do. As we grow as an organization, we're expanding into some of the world's strongest jurisdictions. Speed and efficiency are motivators for our success and our employees live by our company values: High Integrity, Future Forward, Multistakeholder, Mindful, and Driven by Excellence. We have built a flexible work environment where new ideas are encouraged and everyone is a stakeholder.
About the role
As Circle expands the customers and payment methods it serves, our fraud exposure grows and changes. We rely on conservative limits and third-party models today, and we are building our own.
As a Senior Data Scientist on Fraud Analytics, you will own the prediction side of our fraud loop. You will turn labels into features and models, measure their accuracy, and shift Circle from vendor scores to in-house models. You will work with Fraud Strategy, Fraud Operations, Risk Engineering, and Compliance.
What you’ll do
- Build and evaluate fraud models for onboarding, login, account changes, and money movement. Target risks include account takeover, scams, money mules, and stolen and synthetic identity.
- Evaluate third-party risk signals and design the path from vendor models to Circle models, from shadow mode to production.
- Define the label taxonomy and data requirements with Fraud Operations and Risk Engineering, so every event, decision, and outcome becomes training data. This includes the fraud we miss.
- Design holdout and exploration sampling to measure false negatives and the rate at which we wrongly block good customers.
- Track fraud rate, dispute rate, fraud loss rate, and precision across customer segments. Help set thresholds against an agreed loss budget.
- Work with Fraud Strategy to tune thresholds and rules and respond to emerging attacks.
- Backtest, monitor drift, and retrain models on Circle’s fraud platform.
- Help build AI agent workflows for transaction review, fraud-ring analysis, and rule drafting, and evaluate their accuracy against human labels.
Core Requirements
- 5+ years in data science or applied ML on fraud, risk, or financial crime
- Advanced Python and SQL, and experience with XGBoost, LightGBM, or similar
- Experience building models with sparse, delayed, or biased labels, including cold start, reject inference, and chargeback lag
- Strong statistics: anomaly detection, graph or network methods, experimentation, and threshold optimization
- Experience taking models to production and monitoring them
- Clear communication with technical and non-technical partners
- Comfort working through ambiguity and limited historical data
Preferred Requirements
- Fintech, payments, crypto, or card fraud experience, including chargebacks and disputes
- Experience with device intelligence, behavioral signals, or consortium data
- Familiarity with blockchain analytics, AML, and KYC
- Experience evaluating LLM or agent-based review workflows
Circle is on a mission to create an inclusive financial future, with transparency at our core. We consider a wide variety of elements when crafting our compensation ranges and total compensation packages.
Starting pay is determined by various factors, including but not limited to: relevant experience, skill set, qualifications, and other business and organizational needs. Please note that compensation ranges may differ for candidates in other locations.
Base Pay Range: $152,500 - $205,000We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status, or any other protected status required by the laws in the locations where we hire. Additionally, Circle participates in the E-Verify Program in certain locations, as required by law.
Should you require accommodations or assistance in our interview process because of a disability, please reach out to accommodations@circle.com for support. We respect your privacy and will connect with you separately from our interview process to accommodate your needs.
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