Director, Data Science and Machine Learning (Risk and Fraud)New

Director, Data Science and Machine Learning (Risk and Fraud)

WHO WE ARE

At Trustly, we're building a smarter, faster, and more secure financial future by revolutionizing the world of payments. As a global leader in Open Banking Payments, we are establishing Pay by Bank as the new standard at checkout, providing unparalleled freedom, speed, and ease to millions of consumers and merchants worldwide.

Our Ambition: To build the world’s most disruptive payment network and redefine what the payment experience should feel like.

Trustly is a global team of innovators, collaborators, and doers. If you are driven by a strong sense of purpose and thrive in a dynamic, entrepreneurial, and high-growth environment, join us and be part of a team that’s transforming the way the world pays.

About the team

The Data team at Trustly is the backbone of our decision-making and product innovation. We are a global, multidisciplinary collective of Software Engineers, Data Engineers, Machine Learning Specialists, Scientists, and Analysts who believe that data is more than just rows and columns - it is the fuel for a more transparent financial ecosystem.

We operate at the intersection of high-scale engineering and deep financial intelligence. Our team processes millions of transactions in real time, turning complex Open Banking signals into seamless payment experiences. We pride ourselves on a culture of intellectual curiosity, technical excellence, and extreme ownership.

About the role

You will lead the team responsible for building and deploying the machine learning models that determine whether transactions are approved and guaranteed.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will build and ship models yourself while leading, mentoring, and developing a team of Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers. You will own not only the team's roadmap, but also the quality, performance, and business impact of what it delivers in production.

Your work will sit at the intersection of machine learning, payments risk, product, and engineering, with direct impact on approval rates, fraud and loss performance, customer experience, and Trustly's broader payments network.

What You’ll Do

Build and Ship Models

• Build, validate, deploy, and continuously improve machine learning models across ACH return risk, fraud, and account takeover.

• Develop real-time, online, and offline features using transaction, account, device, and behavioral data.

• Design and analyze experiments to evaluate model and policy changes, including champion/challenger tests, holdouts, and staged rollouts.

• Quantify the impact of model changes across loss rates, approval rates, ROI, customer experience, and merchant outcomes.

• Translate complex model performance and findings into clear, actionable insights for non-technical partners across Risk, Product, Finance, and other areas of the business.

Lead the Team and Model Portfolio

• Mentor, develop, and grow a team of full-stack Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers.

• Hire and level talent with the right balance of modeling depth, experimentation expertise, and production engineering capability.

• Own the team's delivery and outcomes: what ships, when it ships, how it performs, and whether it holds up in production.

• Own the model roadmap across ACH return risk, fraud, and account takeover, including prioritization, model reviews, and postmortems following loss events.

• Own model performance in production, including monitoring, drift detection, retraining cadence, model updates, and decisions around when models should be replaced or retired.

• Establish a high bar for technical quality, operational rigor, and measurable business impact across the team.

Govern, Influence, and Partner

• Maintain strong model documentation, validation evidence, and audit trails, and support independent validation of the team's models.

• Ensure production decisions are explainable, with appropriate reason codes available when decisions need to be justified to merchants, internal reviewers, or auditors.

• Partner closely with Product and Engineering on scoring latency, feature availability at decision time, and integration into Trustly's risk engine.

• Co-own decision strategy and the policy layer with Risk Operations, translating model outputs into business outcomes.

• Quantify and communicate the tradeoffs between approval rates, customer experience, and loss rates when recommending changes.

• Co-own loss forecasting with Finance and Risk, connecting model performance and behavior directly to financial outcomes.

• Present model performance, loss drivers, emerging risks, and roadmap tradeoffs to senior and executive stakeholders.

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years of experience building and deploying machine learning models into production, including at least 2 years leading a team.

• A leader who remains deeply hands-on and is currently capable of independently building, deploying, and evaluating a production machine learning model.

• Strong Python and SQL skills, with experience working with large-scale datasets using distributed processing engines or cloud data warehouses such as Athena, Trino, Spark, Redshift, Snowflake, or BigQuery.

• Direct experience in fraud, credit risk, payments risk, or another high-stakes decisioning environment, including rare-event modeling, label delay, reject inference, and understanding the difference between strong model metrics and strong business decisions.

• Experience with real-time inference and production model monitoring in a low-latency decisioning environment, including drift detection, retraining strategies, and model updates.

• Experience owning or materially contributing to a loss budget or loss forecast, with the ability to translate model behavior and risk performance into financial impact for executives and auditors.

• Strong experimentation experience for model and policy changes, including champion/challenger testing,