Director, Fraud Model Development

The role:

SoFi’s Director, Fraud Model Development is a leadership position within SoFi’s fraud model organization whose mission is to protect SoFi and its members using leading edge tools, technology and data models. 

This role will report to the Senior Director of Fraud Models and Ops Business Intelligence and will lead a team responsible for the development and validation of a wide variety of fraud models. This is a highly visible role within SoFi’s data science and BI community and directly contributes towards key company goals and objectives. 

What you’ll do: 

• Innovate:  Bring your brightest ideas to building fraud risk strategies and models. This means you will architect fraud risk models across dozens of dimensions including ACH, payment transactions, credit and ATO risk, among others. You will be empowered to utilize cutting edge data models, and your team will be supported by platform SoFi AI / ML capabilities. You will stay current with industry trends and best practices in modeling and model risk management and apply them to your team’s work.

• Leverage Data to drive decisions:  Your deep analysis will power the future of managing Fraud and protecting our members, using our real-time data ecosystem – including multi-product internal, bureau, third-party, and alternative data sources.  

• Iterate, learn, optimize:  We are all responsible for innovation and must embrace data-driven decisions. You will be expected to build models capable of running various risk scenarios and permutations to ensure SoFi constantly improves the experience and security for our members. 

• Collaborate:  You will work collaboratively with business partners such as Operations, Finance, Legal and Compliance to deliver successful business results. You will partner closely with implementation / engineering teams to accurately deploy new AI/ML models and strategies. You will work with the Model Risk Management group to continually evolve model performance and how we can leverage these models to improve the member experience. 

• Minimize Risk and Drive Performance Outcomes:  You deeply understand Fraud risk and develop approaches to both mitigate loss and responsibly grow revenue. You will monitor the performance of strategies and model portfolios and document and communicate results.   

• Hire and Develop the Best:   You will be expected to be a dynamic leader of our rapidly growing business, where hiring and developing talent is paramount. You will supervise a team of 4-5 model development experts in the work of developing Fraud risk models across numerous member use cases and attack vectors.

What you’ll need:

• At least 8 years of progressive experience in model development or model risk management within midsize or large U.S. financial institutions, including at least 3 years experience supervising model developers. 

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Mathematics, Economics, Engineering, Computer Science, or a quantitative field required. Master’s or Ph.D. degree preferred.

• Deep knowledge of traditional statistical modeling methods (OLS, logistic regression, survival modeling, etc.) and at least moderate knowledge of artificial intelligence / machine learning approaches (gradient boosting models, neural networks, etc.)

• Ability to explain risks associated with complex technical matters to a non-technical audience.
  Experience in building and leading high-performing teams, including attracting and retaining top talent.

• Ability and confidence to exercise influence over a wide range of individuals at all levels of technical and business leadership.

• Preferred:  Experience building or working within graph databases to build Fraud Risk models