Staff Data Scientist, Algorithm (Risk Product – AML & Financial Crime)

The role

You will lead the proactive identification and mitigation of financial crime risk. You will build AI-powered risk detection capabilities and advance AML use cases using customer, transaction, and behavioral data.

What you will do

• Build and scale AI-powered risk detection capabilities across name screening, entity resolution, network intelligence and machine learning
• Advance AML and financial crime use cases including transaction monitoring and detection of coordinated activity
• Partner with Risk Product, Engineering, Financial Crime Compliance and Risk Operations
• Translate complex risk problems into effective, scalable production controls
• Influence the Risk Product roadmap
• Raise the technical bar for Risk Data Science through technical leadership, reusable frameworks and mentoring

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, Applied AI, Risk Analytics or a related quantitative field, with demonstrated impact at Staff, Lead or equivalent scope
• Strong expertise in applied machine learning and modern AI
• Experience building and productionising data-driven solutions at scale
• Experience in one or more areas relevant to financial crime detection, such as NLP and LLMs, entity resolution, information retrieval, graph or network analytics, anomaly detection or risk scoring
• Strong SQL and Python skills
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, payments, banking, marketplaces or another regulated or high-risk domain
• Experience in AML, financial crime, sanctions, PEP screening, adverse media, fraud, trust and safety or transaction monitoring
• Experience building or improving name-screening or adverse-media systems
• Familiarity with modern LLM evaluation, prompt and model experimentation, retrieval-quality assessment and AI observability
• Experience applying graph analytics to detect mule networks, collusive behaviour, coordinated account activity or interconnected high-risk entities
• Experience developing proactive risk-discovery capabilities

About the company

Airwallex is an AI-native financial operating system for a real-time, intelligent economy. It provides financial infrastructure for over 675,000 businesses globally.