Senior Data Scientist (Fraud Detection and Investigative Analytics)

Location: Herndon, VA (Remote Work)

Must have an Public Trust Clearance

Key Responsibilities

• Review, maintain, and extend all existing loan fraud indicators developed by TSD, and provide authoritative expertise on analytic method selection
• Design, develop, test, calibrate, and implement advanced statistical and machine learning models targeting financial fraud, improper payments, and non compliance within SBA programs
• Build and refine both supervised and unsupervised models, including regression, Bayesian, clustering, and ensemble approaches, and tune candidate models to determine best fit
• Perform data quality analysis on source tables to identify abnormalities and inconsistencies, and develop repeatable processes for combining and analyzing large relational, structured, and unstructured sources
• Collaborate directly with criminal investigators to determine and execute analytic strategies supporting loan fraud cases, adapting analysis as case needs shift and proactively surfacing data quality issues
• Adhere closely to the federal rules of criminal procedure governing protected information, including Rule 6(e)
• Develop case leads for SBA OIG investigations from model outcomes
• Document all methodology, test models, and production models in a form that satisfies criminal evidentiary requirements
• Build visualizations and dashboards that convey methodological choices, outcomes, and predictive capability, and iterate them on end user feedback
• Deliver findings in multiple registers: data summaries and visualizations for investigative staff, executive summaries for OIG leadership
• Coordinate with the data engineering seat so the architecture supports machine learning efficiently
• Create programming and automation techniques that improve task efficiency using SharePoint, Python, Excel, Power BI, Power Apps, and similar tools
• Identify new business questions that expand the scope of analysis and reporting

Requirements

Required:

Education

Master's, Ph.D., or doctorate level equivalent degree in data science, machine learning, computer science, mathematics, or a related field. Alternatively, ten years of applied work experience in any of the same fields.

• 5+ years Designing, implementing, and maintaining advanced AI systems and predictive models, including both supervised and unsupervised models.
• 5+ years Developing analytic rules and models using leading edge analytic tools and best practices
• 5+ years Developing regression, classification, and other statistical models to identify anomalies, patterns, and predictive variables.
• 3+ years Providing data support for criminal investigations into financial fraud or abuse of government funds.
• 3+ years Manipulating data in Python. Pandas is required.
• 3+ years Working in a modern cloud environment: Azure, AWS, or GCP. Certifications preferred.
• 2+ years Conducting advanced data analysis in SQL, specifically SQL Server and PostgreSQL.
• 2+ years Developing and scaling natural language processing solutions.
• 2+ years Presenting methods and findings to technical and non technical stakeholders, both orally and in written products and visualizations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Cloud certification in Azure, AWS, or GCP
• Direct experience with SBA loan programs, including 7(a), 504, EIDL, or PPP, or with comparable federal lending or grant fraud
• Entity resolution, record linkage, or graph and network analysis applied to fraud
• Experience producing analytic products that were used in a criminal referral or prosecution
• Model explainability practice such as SHAP or comparable feature attribution methods

Benefits

We are proud to offer competitive compensation and benefits packages to include

• Medical
• Dental
• Vision
• Basic Life
• Health Saving Account
• 401K matching
• Three weeks of PTO/Sick
• 11 Paid Holidays
• Pre-Approved Online Training