Senior Data Scientist

Job Description

Job Description

At Koalafi, we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. That's why we're making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time.

Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers, while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M+ customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200+ Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers.

Interested in learning more about how we're transforming the financing experience and joining our team?

What You'll Do

Are you a senior-level data scientist with a passion for building and deploying high-impact fraud or credit risk models? Koalafi is seeking an experienced Data Scientist to lead the development, deployment, and monitoring of machine learning models that sit at the core of our portfolio's profitability. This role requires someone who thrives in an end-to-end environment—designing predictive models, operationalizing them in production, and ensuring they continue to perform in a dynamic market.

You will be a key contributor to Koalafi's decisioning ecosystem, owning models that directly influence credit outcomes, fraud mitigation, and the financial performance of the company. Beyond technical expertise, you will bring strong business intuition, enabling you to translate modeling insights into strategic decisions. This position reports to the Manager of Data Science and regularly partners with senior leaders across Risk, Fraud, Analytics, and Technology.

Responsibilities

• Build, deploy, and maintain production-grade credit and fraud models that are foundational to our real-time decisioning platform and essential to portfolio profitability
• Own the full MLOps lifecycle—from feature engineering, model training, and experiment management to production deployment, performance monitoring, drift detection, and continuous optimization
• Architect and scale end-to-end ML pipelines, ensuring reliability, reproducibility, and seamless integration with core decisioning services
• Design robust model monitoring frameworks that enable tracing, profiling, explainability, and rapid root-cause analysis for production incidents or model degradation
• Partner with data science, risk, and engineering leaders to shape modeling strategy, improve credit policy, and strengthen fraud defenses in response to customer behavior and macroeconomic trends
• Drive continuous improvement of existing models, incorporating new data sources, advanced techniques, and rigorous validation processes
• Communicate complex model logic and insights to non-technical stakeholders, clearly linking modeling decisions to business outcomes and strategic priorities

About You

Preferred Qualifications

Why choose Koalafi : A career at Koalafi means opportunities to tackle exciting challenges every single day. We take pride in a culture of innovation, trust, and ownership. You'll get outside your comfort zone, build meaningful relationships, and most of all, take charge of projects that ultimately help people get the things they need most.

Benefits :

At Koalafi, you will have a direct impact on our products and help shape the company's success. We offer competitive compensation & benefits packages to keep you at your best :

Who we are & what we value :