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AI Merchant Category Risk Scoring Developer

Cole Mueller

Full-time · Job · New_York

About the role

Merchant category codes tell you what kind of business a merchant claims to be. They do not tell you whether the business is a front for card testing, a high-chargeback operation in disguise, or a legitimate business operating in a genuinely risky category. Risk scoring that goes beyond MCC — incorporating transaction pattern analysis, chargeback velocity, and behavioral fingerprinting — is what separates intelligent merchant underwriting from rubber-stamp approvals. Our payment platform underwrites 22,000 merchants across 140 countries. The current merchant risk model produces scores that correlate with chargeback rates at 0.61 Spearman rank correlation. We are targeting 0.78 by adding temporal transaction pattern features that the current model ignores. You will own the merchant risk model: redesigning the feature set around behavioral patterns, improving score calibration across merchant categories that have very different baseline risk profiles, and building the monitoring that alerts the risk team when a merchant score diverges significantly from their baseline.

Responsibilities

  • Redesign merchant risk scoring with temporal transaction pattern features
  • Improve score calibration across merchant categories with different baseline risk
  • Build behavioral fingerprinting features for merchant transaction pattern analysis
  • Implement monitoring alerting when merchant risk scores diverge from baselines
  • Design evaluation framework using chargeback rate outcomes as ground truth
  • Collaborate with compliance team on card network reporting requirements

Requirements

  • 3+ years in risk modeling, fraud analytics, or ML with payments domain experience
  • Experience with behavioral feature engineering on transaction event data
  • Strong Python and SQL skills, familiarity with Spark for large-scale processing
  • Understanding of calibration and ranking metrics for risk scoring
  • Knowledge of payment industry concepts: MCC, chargebacks, card network rules

Benefits

  • Fully remote
  • Comprehensive health coverage
  • 401(k) with match
  • $3,000 professional development budget
  • Equity participation

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Categories

data science & analytics AI & Machine Learning Engineers

Skills

python pytorch sql statistics pandas

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Job Type

Full-time

Level

Mid-Level

Language

English

Salary Range

$100k – $130k / year

AI Expertise

data science & analytics AI & Machine Learning Engineers

Skills

python pytorch sql statistics pandas spark

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