Lead Data Scientist

Job Overview

Finicity, a Mastercard company, is leading the Open Banking Initiative to increase the Financial Health of consumers and businesses. The Data Science and Analytics team is looking for a Lead Data Scientist. The Data Science team works on Intelligent Decisioning;
Financial Certainty;
Attribute, Feature, and Entity Resolution;
Verification Solutions and more. Join our team to make an impact across all sectors of the economy by consistently innovating and problem‑solving.

• Lead, mentor and grow the data science team and tech stack focused on developing production‑grade services and capabilities.
• Plan and direct data science / machine learning projects within the team.
• Design and implement machine learning models for a number of financial applications including, but not limited to, Transaction Classification, Temporal Analysis, Risk modelling from structured and unstructured data.
• Measure, validate, implement, monitor and improve performance of both internal and external facing machine learning models.
• Apply various machine learning techniques (e.g., SVM, Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, CATBoost) and deep learning techniques (e.g., LSTM, RNN, Transformer) and LLMs to solve analytical problem statements.
• Propose creative solutions to existing challenges that are new to the company, the financial industry and to data science.
• Present technical problems and findings to business leaders internally and to clients succinctly and clearly.
• Leverage best practices in machine learning and data engineering to develop scalable solutions.
• Identify areas where resources fall short of needs and provide thoughtful and sustainable solutions to benefit the team.
• Be a strong, confident, and excellent writer and speaker, able to communicate your vision and roadmap effectively to a wide variety of stakeholders.

• 7+ years in data science / machine learning model development and deployments.
• Exposure to financial transactional structured and unstructured data, transaction classification, risk evaluation and credit risk modelling is a plus.
• Strong understanding of NLP, statistical modelling, visualization and advanced data science techniques/methods.
• Gain insights from text, including non‑language tokens and use the thought process of annotations in text analysis.
• Experience with SQL / database.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, Docker, REST APIs, event streams or other delivery mechanisms.
• Familiarity with relevant technologies (e.g., GenAI, LLMs, Agentic AI, Tensor Flow, Python, Scikit‑learn, Pandas).
• Strong desire to collaborate and ability to come up with creative solutions.
• Finance and Fin Tech experience preferred.
• Bachelor's or Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics; M.S. preferred.

• Insurance (medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, disability, life insurance).
• Flexible spending account and health savings account.
• Paid leaves (including 16 weeks of new parent leave and up to 20 days of bereavement leave).
• 80 hours of paid sick and safe time.
• 25 days of vacation time and 5 personal days, prorated based on date of hire.
• 10 annual paid U.S. observed holidays.
• 401(k) with a best‑in‑class company match.
• Deferred compensation for eligible roles.
• Fitness reimbursement or on‑site fitness facilities.
• Eligibility for tuition reimbursement.
• Other benefits.

Pay Range – Salt Lake City, Utah: $140,000 – $231,000 USD.

Mastercard is a merit‑based, inclusive, equal opportunity employer that considers applicants without regard to gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We hire the most qualified candidate for the role.