Lead Data Scientist

Forward Financing is a financial technology company based in Boston, Massachusetts with team members throughout the United States, Dominican Republic, and Canada. The company is on a mission to unlock the capital that fuels small businesses across America. Recognized as a Best Place to Work by Built In Boston and certified as a Great Place To Work®, Forward is investing in its employees, technology, and customer experience – with long-term success in mind every step of the way.

We are seeking a Lead Data Scientist to drive end-to-end data science initiatives, transforming complex data into strategic decisions and automated solutions across the organization. You will operate at the intersection of high-level technical execution and cross-functional business partnership, building and scaling advanced analytical solutions that deliver measurable impact across all business domains at Forward Financing.

In this role you will:

- Design, develop and deploy advanced statistical or machine learning models for credit risk, pricing, collections, fraud, and other high-impact business use cases that drive better data-driven decisions

- Lead end-to-end delivery of data science initiatives from problem framing and model design through deployment, monitoring and ongoing maintenance

- Partner with cross-functional teams including Portfolio Strategy, Engineering, Product, Underwriting, Sales and Collections to integrate models into our applications, and proactively identify and solve problems in critical business areas

- Define and set standards for model development, code quality, and documentation; guide technical design decisions across the team

- Act as a technical mentor to team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and rigorous analytical standards

- Communicate complex technical concepts and business implications to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

- Build and maintain production machine learning pipelines and monitoring system...