Director of Data Science, Credit

The role

You will own the strategy and technical leadership for credit acquisition models. You will lead a team of data scientists and align modeling with company growth and underwriting goals.

What you will do

• Own credit acquisition modeling strategy
• Translate growth and underwriting goals into a roadmap
• Provide technical leadership for data scientists
• Set standards for model design, code quality, and production rigor
• Manage model risk and monitoring practices
• Align with Credit Risk, Portfolio, Data Engineering, and leadership
• Shape the expansion of the function as scope grows

Required qualifications

• PhD in a quantitative field and 5+ years of experience in a related role, or a BS/MS in a quantitative field and 8+ years of experience in a related role
• Created, deployed, and managed supervised learning models in a production environment for high-impact applications
• Direct experience hiring, coaching, and developing data scientists as their manager
• Applied data science to credit risk, underwriting, or another long-horizon, regulated prediction problem
• Writes tested, reviewed, reproducible code for data pipelines and model training
• Works fluently in the Python data stack
• Able to travel ~4-6+ times per year

Nice to have

• Direct experience in consumer lending; credit card acquisitions, specifically
• Familiarity with Mission Lane's broader ML tooling ecosystem, including Chalk, BentoML, or DVC
• Experience partnering directly with executive leadership on modeling strategy

Benefits

• Paid time off
• 401(k) match
• Monthly wellness stipend
• Health/dental/vision insurance options
• Disability coverage
• Paid parental leave
• Flexible spending account (for childcare and healthcare)
• Life insurance
• Remote-first work environment

Before you apply

• Not sponsoring new applicant employment authorization
• No third-party recruiters
• Verify that information in application is accurate and complete

About the company

Mission Lane is a purpose-driven fintech company based in the U.S., with headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. It offers credit cards with better, clearer terms to people working to improve their credit.