Director, Data Science and Machine Learning; Risk and Fraud

Director, Data Science and Machine Learning (Risk and Fraud)

At Trustly, we're building a smarter, faster, and more secure financial future by revolutionizing the world of payments. As a global leader in Open Banking Payments, we are establishing Pay by Bank as the new standard at checkout, providing unparalleled freedom, speed, and ease to millions of consumers and merchants worldwide.

Our Ambition:
To build the world’s most disruptive payment network and redefine what the payment experience should feel like.

Trustly is a global team of innovators, collaborators, and doers. If you are driven by a strong sense of purpose and thrive in a dynamic, entrepreneurial, and high-growth environment, join us and be part of a team that’s transforming the way the world pays.

The Data team at Trustly is the backbone of our decision-making and product innovation. We are a global, multidisciplinary collective of Software Engineers, Data Engineers, Machine Learning Specialists, Scientists, and Analysts who believe that data is more than just rows and columns - it is the fuel for a more transparent financial ecosystem.

We operate at the intersection of high-scale engineering and deep financial intelligence. Our team processes millions of transactions in real time, turning complex Open Banking signals into seamless payment experiences. We pride ourselves on a culture of intellectual curiosity, technical excellence, and extreme ownership.

You will lead the team responsible for building and deploying the machine learning models that determine whether transactions are approved and guaranteed.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will build and ship models yourself while leading, mentoring, and developing a team of Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers. You will own not only the team's roadmap, but also the quality, performance, and business impact of what it delivers in production.

Your work will sit at the intersection of machine learning, payments risk, product, and engineering, with direct impact on approval rates, fraud and loss performance, customer experience, and Trustly's broader payments network.

• Build, validate, deploy, and continuously improve machine learning models across ACH return risk, fraud, and account takeover.

• Develop real-time, online, and offline features using transaction, account, device, and behavioral data.

• Design and analyze experiments to evaluate model and policy changes, including champion/challenger tests, holdouts, and staged rollouts.

• Quantify the impact of model changes across loss rates, approval rates, ROI, customer experience, and merchant outcomes.

• Translate complex model performance and findings into clear, actionable insights for non-technical partners across Risk, Product, Finance, and other areas of the business.

• Mentor, develop, and grow a team of full-stack Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers.

• Hire and level talent with the right balance of modeling depth, experimentation expertise, and production engineering capability.

• Own the team's delivery and outcomes: what ships, when it ships, how it performs, and whether it holds up in production.

• Own the model roadmap across ACH return risk, fraud, and account takeover, including prioritization, model reviews, and postmortems following loss events.

• Own model performance in production, including monitoring, drift detection, retraining cadence, model updates, and decisions around when models should be replaced or retired.

• Establish a high bar for technical quality, operational rigor, and measurable business impact across the team.

• Maintain strong model documentation,…