Data Science Team Lead

About the role:

Forter is looking for an excellent Data Science Team Lead to join our team! Stand as the unique leader, positioned at the intersection of fraud analysis, data science, and system flow engineering, to extract insights and deliver pivotal components of logic at the core of the Forter system.

What you’ll be doing:

• Be the professional leader and mentor to a team of talented data scientists and researchers.
• Devise creative solutions to highly intricate real-world problems, using statistics, domain expertise, ML, graph theory, or anything else.
• Work on the core of a multi-faceted system, at the junction of identity, similarity, and fraud detection, which is at the heart of Forter’s technology, and critical to its bottom line.
• Find techniques for automated learning from our data, which is meso-big and only sometimes tagged. In particular, hold our complex similarity search, clustering and anomaly detection fields.
• Work alongside domain experts to define and develop the way we should synthesize a large corpus of analytical knowledge insights into a scalable streamed flow.
• Develop measures, metrics, and uses for our large graph of humans and how to spot those fraudsters hiding in there.
• Promote solutions and sophisticated ideas, communicate them to peers, management and customers. Be the Data Science face of the identity network domain of the company.

What you’ll need:

• Proven record of at least 3 years of leading a team of experienced data scientists with clear KPIs and results that moved the needle.
• Strong academic background and hands-on industry experience.
• Working with analysts or domain experts - an advantage.
• Proven ability to work well sideways (with peers and vendors) and upward (with management).
• Proven team building and management abilities. Your people are very effective, happy, energized, and grow.
• Delivery oriented and capable: Algorithms, processes, specifications to R&D.
• Proactive. Tell us where we can use data more effectively, but we currently do not. Draw the boundaries of what is possible - you are the expert.
• Wide knowledge of statistical methods, Bayesian probability, and machine learning techniques.
• Background in: Python, SQL,
• Experience with Big Data, including parallel processing of NoSQL data stores - a plus.
• Professional proficiency in English.

Nice to haves:

• Proactive contribution to the data science community (Please add links to your Kaggle / Git account).
• Worked with not-so-big-data, skewed and noisy labeling, and a non-stationary world... but could still extract the best information possible.
• Interesting problems you’ve dealt with, that weren’t trivial.
• Side projects that you couldn’t resist building.

About us:

Digital commerce is built on trust. At every point along the eCommerce journey, businesses must make a critical decision: Can I trust this customer? Answering this simple question accurately and instantly is powerful—it can accelerate revenue growth and strengthen a company’s connection with its customers. How do we do it? Forter was founded on the insight that it's not about what is being purchased, nor where— but who is behind the interaction.

The Forter Decision Engine finds patterns across more than one billion identities in our dataset. We isolate fraudsters and protect customers—ensuring everyone gets the experience they deserve. Given that trust is central to how we operate, Forter is very much driven by a defined set of values. We attract remarkable talent and have retention and engagement levels that are well above benchmarks. We’re meticulous about strengthening our culture as we grow and ensuring this is an environment where people can have outsized impact.

Trust is backed by data – Forter is a recipient of over 10 workplace and innovation awards, including:

• Great Place to Work Certification (2021, 2022, 2023)
• Fortune’s Best Workplaces in NYC (2022)
• #3 on Fast Company’s list of “Most Innovative Finance Companies” (2022)
• Forbes Cloud 100 (2021, 2022)
• SAP Pinnacle Awards “New Partner Application Award” (2023)
• Fintech Breakthrough Awards – Best Fraud Prevention Platform (2023)

Life as a Forterian:

We are a team of over 500 Forterians spread across 3 different continents. Since 2013, we've raised $525 million from investors such as Tiger Global, Bessemer, Sequoia Capital, March Capital and Salesforce Ventures. We're on a mission to bring trust to global digital commerce so that companies like Nordstrom, Priceline, Instacart and ASOS can block fraud, drive revenue and improve customer experience.

At Forter, we believe unique people create unique ideas, and valuable experience comes in many forms. So, even if your background doesn't match everything we have listed in the job description, we still encourage you to apply and tell us why your skills and values could be an asset to us. By welcoming different perspectives, we grow together as humans and as a company.

Forter is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that will consider all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, gender identity or expression, national origin, genetics, age, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please email us at [email protected]. This information will be treated as confidential and used only for the purpose of determining an appropriate accommodation for the interview process.

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