Hybrid Senior Director, Data Science

at DailyPay

• Job title: Senior Director, Data Science
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $240,000 - $336,000 per year
• Degree requirement: Postgraduate Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Cloud, PySpark, Python, PyTorch, Ruby on Rails, Scikit-Learn, SQL, Tensorflow
• Location requirements: Hybrid, New York City, United States

About the role

• Sr Director of Data Science leading payments and risk data science at DailyPay. Overseeing team of data scientists and advanced model deployment in a regulated environment.

Responsibilities

• Define and Champion Strategy: Develop and articulate the 1-3 year roadmap for Data Science, aligning all priorities with the broader product/business objectives.
• Drive Next-Generation Capabilities: Incorporate industry trends and advanced techniques (NLP, Graph Mining, LLMs, Deep Learning) to solve complex, high-impact risk problems where established principles may not fully apply.
• Talent and Team Development: Lead the current team of high-performing Staff and Senior Data Scientists. Recruit, mentor, and foster talent through deliberate interactions, succession planning, and creating a high-accountability, low-ego culture.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Interact and negotiate with senior management and Product Leads to reconcile competing views and drive critical, high-impact business decisions.
• Influence the direction of the company's AI/ML strategy and contribute to long-term planning.
• Payment Models: Directly oversee the development and deployment of Earned Wage Access payment models designed to safely advance pay to workers while maintaining loss guardrails.
• Fraud Prevention: Develop advanced fraud prevention measures and models embedded into real-time decisioning to protect from increasingly sophisticated threats—spanning identity theft, synthetic fraud, account takeovers, and scams—before they happen.
• Loss Mitigation: Drive the successful build-out and implementation of predictive loss models and rules to pre-empt operating losses from advances.
• Loss Forecasting & Compliance: Lead the development of Loss Forecasting and CECL models, ensuring they align with industry practices and meet all regulatory requirements for the firm's balance sheet and reserve calculations.
• Automation and Efficiency: Lead efforts to automate model monitoring and governance processes (MLOps) to create scalable and auditable infrastructure.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate ML models into products and services.

Requirements

• 15+ years of progressive experience in payments, risk and fraud with at least 7 years in a senior leadership/management role (managing managers and/or technical leads).
• Proven track record of building and mentoring expert AI/ML teams that consistently deliver innovative solutions, resulting in measurable business impact and sustained competitive advantage.
• Deep familiarity with the payments ecosystem (issuing, acquiring, gateways, ACH/Rails) and the unique adversarial nature of financial fraud.within a regulated financial institution (FinTech, Bank, or similar).
• Advanced Degree: Ph.D. in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Operations Research, or a related quantitative field is highly preferred.
• Applied AI Scale: Experience deploying GNNs or Transformer-based models in a high-throughput, low latency production environment (not just offline research).
• Transformation Experience: A track record of modernizing legacy model stacks (e.g., moving from logistic regression/forests to Deep Learning/AI) in a large enterprise.
• Tools & Platforms: Expert-level proficiency in Python (PySpark, scikit-learn, TensorFlow/PyTorch) and SQL/data warehouse technologies (e.g., Snowflake, Hive). Familiarity with modern MLOps platforms and cloud computing (AWS).
• Communication: Exceptional executive presence and the ability to distill highly complex analytical concepts into clear, concise, and compelling narratives for non-technical leadership.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation
• Opportunity for equity ownership
• Exceptional health, vision, and dental care
• Employee Resource Groups
• Fun company outings and events
• Unlimited PTO
• 401K with company match