Staff Data Scientist - Digital Intelligence
Socure is hiring a Staff Data Scientist - Digital Intelligence in San Francisco, United States. It pays $191k-$230k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Socure.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this data scientist role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- Pay on this posting starts 15% higher than the typical data scientist posting on Level.
- The posting mentions PyTorch, TensorFlow and scikit-learn among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a lead role.
- Socure has 82 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Lead machine learning initiatives to turn high-scale device and behavioral telemetry into production-grade fraud signals.
Why Socure?
Socure is building the identity trust infrastructure for the digital economy — verifying 100% of good identities in real time and stopping fraud before it starts. The mission is big, the problems are complex, and the impact is felt by businesses, governments, and millions of people every day.
We hire people who want that level of responsibility. People who move fast, think critically, act like owners, and care deeply about solving customer problems with precision. If you want predictability or narrow scope, this won’t be your place. If you want to help build the future of identity with a team that holds a high bar for itself — keep reading.
Job Summary:
Socure is the leading provider of digital identity verification and fraud prevention solutions, using AI and machine learning to power accurate identity trust decisions. Our mission is to eliminate identity fraud and ensure online trust across industries.
We are seeking a Staff Data Scientist to join our Digital Intelligence team. In this role, you will provide technical leadership for turning noisy, high-scale device, network, browser, mobile, API, and behavioral telemetry into production-grade fraud and identity risk signals.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will lead ambiguous signal-development efforts, define rigorous evaluation methods, influence what telemetry we collect, and help set the technical direction for how Digital Intelligence detects risky behavior, recognizes trustworthy devices and sessions, and adapts to adversarial change.
Job Responsibilities:
Lead high-impact machine learning and feature-development initiatives across device, network, browser, mobile, session, and behavioral intelligence.
Own ambiguous fraud and identity risk problems where data quality, label reliability, adversarial behavior, customer impact, and product tradeoffs must be evaluated together.
Develop production risk signals and models that balance fraud detection, false-positive risk, coverage, latency, explainability, robustness, and operational maintainability.
Build and guide scalable feature-engineering approaches for high-cardinality, sparse, noisy, and platform-dependent telemetry.
Investigate complex signal patterns such as spoofing, emulator behavior, automation, proxy/VPN usage, low-entropy fingerprints, telemetry gaps, device fragmentation, and over-linkage risk.
Define evaluation methods for Digital Intelligence signals, including holdout design, leakage checks, drift monitoring, adversarial robustness, customer impact analysis, and long-term signal stability.
Influence telemetry collection, data contracts, feature logging, model monitoring, and production readiness in partnership with engineering, product, risk, and platform teams.
Translate open-ended product, customer, and fraud-risk questions into clear data science approaches, measurable hypotheses, and production-ready signal roadmaps.
Raise team standards for feature quality, model validation, explainability, documentation, and risk-signal governance.
Communicate technical recommendations, tradeoffs, limitations, and results clearly to data science peers, engineering partners, product stakeholders, risk teams, and senior leadership.
Mentor data scientists by improving problem framing, modeling judgment, validation rigor, code quality, and ability to operate independently in ambiguous domains.
Job Requirements:
Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, Data Science, or a related quantitative field.
12+ years of experience in data science, applied machine learning, statistical modeling, or related technical roles.
Significant experience building, deploying, validating, and improving production machine learning models, risk signals, or decisioning systems.
Strong background in fraud detection, identity verification, trust and safety, anomaly detection, cybersecurity, risk modeling, or another adversarial data domain.
Expert-level SQL skills and extensive experience working with large-scale, complex, noisy datasets.
Strong proficiency in Python and distributed data processing frameworks such as Spark, PySpark, or equivalent tools.
Deep understanding of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, anomaly detection, feature engineering, model evaluation, production monitoring, and statistical validation.
Demonstrated ability to work with imperfect labels, delayed outcomes, telemetry artifacts, instrumentation gaps, and changing fraud patterns.
Strong judgment across data quality, modeling approach, feature design, explainability, operational complexity, and business impact.
Experience influencing data architecture, instrumentation, feature logging, and product direction through technical credibility rather than direct authority.
Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex data science decisions and risk tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
Strong mentorship skills and a track record of improving the technical quality and judgment of other data scientists.
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with device intelligence, browser/mobile fingerprinting, behavioral biometrics, network intelligence, VPN/proxy detection, entity resolution, or graph-based risk signals.
Experience designing features from high-cardinality categorical data using techniques such as aggregation, frequency encoding, target encoding, embeddings, graph features, or representation learning.
Experience with streaming, near-real-time, or low-latency decisioning systems.
Familiarity with adversarial modeling, robust ML, privacy-preserving ML, interpretable ML, or responsible AI practices.
Hands-on experience with ML frameworks such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar.
Experience setting standards for model explainability, feature governance, validation methodology, or production ML observability.
You will help shape a critical Digital Intelligence capability within Socure’s fraud prevention and identity verification platform, using high-scale device, network, browser, mobile, session, and behavioral telemetry to build risk signals used in real-world production decisions.
You will have meaningful ownership over ambiguous, high-impact technical problems, from signal strategy and evaluation design to production rollout and long-term signal quality. This role offers the opportunity to influence telemetry, product direction, and data science standards while mentoring others and deepening Socure’s ability to recognize trusted digital interactions and detect adversarial behavior.
Socure is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity in all its forms within our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
If you need an accommodation during any stage of the application or hiring process—including interview or onboarding support—please reach out to your Socure recruiting partner directly.
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How we rate this
Staff Data Scientist - Digital Intelligence at Socure rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in data scientist jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $191k
- Typical data scientist job
- $166k
This posting starts 15% above the typical data scientist job. See data scientist jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide that one model's output is better than another's for a given task?
- How do you think about the risk of an AI system in this kind of role failing silently?
- Tell me about a project where data science was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where fraud detection was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where feature engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Evaluation, AI Safety, Data Science, Fraud Detection, and Feature Engineering. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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