Data Scientist 1

What you need to know about the role

We are looking for a Senior Risk Analyst or Senior Decision Scientist with experience in credit cards, seller risk, or deposit risk developing acquisition or portfolio management risk strategies to balance user experience and risk (fraud, abuse, and settlement). The position is part of a larger Small Medium Business (SMB) Seller Risk team that manages both Seller Risk and different payment solutions both physical and digital. Qualified individual exhibit ability to think creatively while balancing multiple constraints to execution on the team objective.

Meet Your Team

PayPal’s SMB payment product solutions Risk team is responsible for assessing and managing buyer and seller side financial risk exposures which includes identity theft, stolen financials, account takeover, and merchant fraud risk. To manage these risks, we leverage analytics that drives insights into policies and strategies that we implement and continuously test for optimization that balances risk and rewards. The team is also responsible for partnering with the corresponding Business Units to align with and influence their strategic priorities and product roadmap, educate business partners about Risk management principles, and collaboratively optimize the Risk treatments and experiences for these unique products and partners. 

Your way to impact

This role will be part of a team that focuses on managing Zettle, PayPal’s Point of Sales solutions.  This team manages the risk lifecycle from onboarding to transactions.  The individual is expected to lead and execute the daily management of this product to balance authorization rate to optimize user experience while mitigating losses within defined risk tolerance.  .  

The work is fast paced and intellectually challenges to solve complex business problems that cover various markets across the world.  If you’re interested in working with PayPal’s most interesting payments experiences, then this is the right team to join! 

Your day-to-day

• Developing strategy through analytics that include understanding of the swap-in and swap-out trade-offs in losses and end user experience. 
• Presentation to senior management within Risk and Business Unit on core strategy changes 
• Monitoring and management fraud events  
• Working with both Risk Product and Business Product organizations on risk control requirements from feature development for strategy implementation to platform orchestration on step-up authentication 
• Partnering with data scientist to develop statistical models as part of tools kits in managing different risks 
• Work is generally self-directed.  
• Works on assignments that are of intermediate complexity with multiple steps in execution, and guided by generally defined processes and project requirements  
• Managing approval rate, complaint rate, and loss target.   

What Do You Need To Bring

•  Strong analytical skills -- ability to build quick estimates using back-of-the-envelope analysis, structure (and, if needed, execute) more complex analyses, pull together business cases with financial support to navigate through multi-dimensional sets of tradeoffs. 
• Enthusiasm for data-driven problem solving within a fast-paced environment is a must. In addition, experience with statistical optimization software, working knowledge of SQL or other relational database languages, and hands-on experience in data analysis involving large data sets are strongly desired. 
• Polished communication and influence skills to collaborate cross-functionally across different global markets with product managers, data scientists, business owners, and customers to learn from various subject-matter experts.  Presenting in a clear and concise manner and reach alignment on how to execute risk strategies.  
• Demonstrated ability to influence groups and effectively finding solutions that enable business growth while balancing risk controls. 
• An innate intellectual curiosity, and a willingness to build awareness of current payments industry and risk management best practices. PayPal is constantly innovating by introducing new products and entering new markets, so successful risk analysts on this team must quickly get up to speed on new content areas. You will be expected to become an expert in your specific domain 
• “Can-do” attitude, team player, energetic personality, ability to work well under pressure in a fast-paced and constantly changing environment to meet deadlines. The successful risk analyst is a self-starter who has the resilience to learn from their mistakes and reach their true potential. 
• Identify glitches in processes and tools and develop and execute solutions to overcome general issues and obstacles with little supervision.  
• Learning in-depth analysis of alternatives and applying specialized knowledge 
• Impact of decision has moderate reach 
• Seeks improvement within defined tasks. Understands, evaluates, and executes improvement ideas from supervisors 
• BS/BA degree with 5+ years of experience or master’s degree with 3+ years of experience.