Data Scientist

What You’ll Do

Do you have a passion for data, analytics, and machine learning models? Koalafi is searching for an innovative Data Scientist with strengths in building, deploying and maintaining production ML models to join our team. The ideal candidate will not only possess the technical acumen to oversee our end-to-end decisioning platform but also have a solid background in predictive modeling and data science, ensuring they contribute insights beyond just writing code.

This position will report to the Manager of Data Science and will also have contact with other senior leaders within the credit analytics, fraud, and technology teams. This person will work closely with our product and engineering teams and will have the opportunity to drive critical business outcomes for the company.

• Partner closely with the data science and engineering teams to deploy and maintain industry-leading risk, fraud, and forecasting models.
• Build, enhance, and scale an end-to-end production pipeline for ML models from data transformation to scoring.
• Create intuitive and efficient processes for monitoring, tracing, profiling, and debugging of deployed models.
• Work closely with the data science team and product owners to continuously evaluate and improve production models.
• Analyze customer dynamics and macroeconomic trends to optimize credit policy and influence business strategy.
• Leverage your interpersonal skills to translate the complexity of your work into tangible business goals.

About You

• 2+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning models, with a strong grasp of the end-to-end modeling lifecycle from feature engineering to validation and productionization.
• 2+ years of professional experience writing performant, maintainable Python code in a collaborative production environment, leveraging core data science libraries like pandas, numpy, xgboost, and scikit-learn.
• Proficient in SQL for querying, transforming, and analyzing large datasets, and comfortable working across relational databases and cloud-based data platforms.
• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles, and apply them to build robust and scalable data solutions.
• Bachelor’s degree in a quantitative or STEM field (e.g., Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering) and demonstrate strong analytical and problem-solving skills in your work.
• Location Requirement: This position requires regular in-person attendance at one of our two office locations (Richmond, VA or Arlington, VA). Candidates must already be located within a commutable distance to either location, as relocation assistance is not available at this time.

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced technical and analytical background, ideally with a Master’s or PhD in a quantitative or STEM field, and a strong understanding of probability, statistics, and predictive modeling algorithms (e.g., Boosting, Random Forests, Decision Trees, Bayesian models).
• Exposure to data and compute platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks.
• Background in financial services or experience working in fast-moving, high-growth environments such as startups.
• Experience with modern ML infrastructure and tooling, including MLOps frameworks (e.g., MLflow, BentoML), CI/CD automation, and model observability, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with large language models (LLMs) and their deployment in production environments.

Client-provided location(s): Richmond, VA

Job ID: 5685933004

Employment Type: OTHER

Posted: 2025-10-21T18:29:11