AI ML Specialist - Financial Services (Fraud, Risk Forecasting)

📋 Description

• • Kumo is at the forefront of developing the next generation of Artificial Intelligence for structured data, leveraging our innovative Relational Foundation Model to empower some of the world's largest companies. We enable these organizations to transform their data into powerful predictions, informed decisions, and fully automated systems. Our technology is already a trusted component within major consumer banking and financial institutions globally.
• • Our company culture is built on collaboration, rapid iteration, and an unwavering focus on user needs. We seek individuals who are proactive, possess a strong capacity for rapid learning, communicate effectively, and thrive on tackling complex technical and interpersonal challenges.
• • The financial services industry is undergoing a significant transformation, moving beyond traditional 'flat table' data analysis. The most valuable insights for critical areas like fraud detection, risk assessment, and financial forecasting are now found in the intricate connections and temporal evolution of entities – accounts, devices, merchants, transactions, and the underlying networks.
• • Graph Transformers represent a generational leap in model quality for these highly connected datasets. This role offers a unique opportunity to bring this advancement to the most sophisticated data science and ML teams in finance. These teams will rigorously test every aspect of our technology, including leakage, ablations, calibration, robustness, and drift, ensuring only the most reliable solutions are adopted for real-world deployment.
• • As an Applied ML Specialist, you will be instrumental in both advancing our core ML algorithms for financial use cases and working directly with customers to ensure these capabilities are implemented effectively, trusted, and deployed. Crucially, you will feed these real-world learnings back into our product development cycle, creating a virtuous loop of innovation.
• • This position is ideal for individuals energized by high-stakes predictive problems in domains such as fraud, risk, and forecasting, where the 'last mile' of implementation and adoption is critical. You should possess a highly technical profile, a research-oriented mindset, and strong engineering instincts.
• • We are looking for someone excited by customer-facing responsibilities and the ownership of outcomes. In a startup environment, the most impactful product ideas often originate from direct customer engagement and field experience.
• • The role offers significant leverage: the solutions and improvements you develop will become foundational platform capabilities, benefiting numerous customer deployments.
• • Your primary responsibilities will include supporting and eventually owning the technical success for strategic financial services customers as they adopt Kumo. You will translate their needs into tangible results and contribute to the enhancement of our core platform.
• • You will take ownership of specific domains such as fraud detection, AML (Anti-Money Laundering), credit risk assessment, or forecasting. This ownership involves defining success metrics, developing comprehensive evaluation plans, executing experiments, and driving successful adoption.
• • You will work hands-on with large-scale relational datasets and customer data pipelines, with a particular emphasis on connected and temporal modeling techniques.
• • A key aspect of the role involves designing and executing rigorous model validation processes. This includes ensuring leakage-proof evaluations, assessing calibration, testing robustness against drift and adversarial attacks, and developing practical interpretability methods suitable for operational teams.
• • You will be responsible for translating ambiguous customer needs into concrete modeling workflows and actionable rollout strategies.
• • Close collaboration with Kumo's engineering and research teams is essential. You will act as a conduit, ensuring that platform improvements are informed by real-world customer constraints and challenges.
• • You will serve as a technical leader and trusted advisor to our customers. It's understood that deploying ML effectively is as much a challenge of people and business integration as it is a technical one.
• • You will deliver compelling demos, conduct workshops, share best practices, and actively assist in moving projects from pilot phases to full production and expansion. This includes providing technical diligence during sales cycles.
• • Example use cases you might engage with include: advanced fraud detection (identifying rings, mule networks, account takeovers (ATO), card-not-present (CNP) fraud, and other abuse patterns), credit scoring, comprehensive risk modeling, underwriting processes, and relational forecasting across various entities and time horizons. You may also work on financial customer analytics, such as propensity modeling, customer retention strategies, growth initiatives, and risk-aware marketing campaigns.
• • This role offers a unique blend of cutting-edge ML research applied to complex financial datasets, where Graph Transformers can unlock substantial improvements. The 'field-to-core' leverage means your insights directly shape shipped product capabilities, transforming one-off solutions into scalable platform features.
• • You will experience unparalleled ownership and speed, moving quickly, leading critical initiatives, and witnessing the direct impact of your work. This role promises significant career acceleration, combining deep technical work with customer-facing technical leadership, building a highly valuable and compounding skill set.
• • You will thrive here if you bring robust ML fundamentals, excellent interpersonal instincts, and an intrinsic drive to push yourself and the technology beyond previous limits.