Background

Nikel is a fintech company transforming lending through smarter credit management solutions. Our end-to-end digital lending platform makes lending smarter, fairer, and faster—empowering lenders with automation and risk management, while giving borrowers access to financing with trust and ease. We build solutions where lending and trust go hand in hand, helping partners grow with confidence and resilience.

Job Summary

The Company is seeking an experienced Senior Data Scientist to lead the development of scorecards, credit scoring models, and regulatory-aligned risk analytics. This role is ideal for professionals with a strong background in banking, P2P lending, and/or consumer/SME credit, who can balance technical modeling skills with deep understanding of risk management, regulatory reporting, and credit lifecycle processes. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams and collaborate with stakeholders to deliver innovative data solutions that enable informed decision-making and business growth.

What you’ll bring:

• Deep Credit Risk Acumen: You have a fundamental understanding of credit portfolio dynamics, risk segmentation, and the entire credit lifecycle. You can translate complex business problems in lending into a clear analytical and modeling framework.
• Curious and creative mindset: You thrive in solving complex, undefined problems and have a passion for exploring new ideas. You’re not afraid to ask the tough questions or present innovative approaches, and you can distill your insights for non-technical audiences.
• Strong technical expertise: You have hands-on experience building data science solutions from concept to production, leveraging open-source tools and modern cloud computing platforms. You can work comfortably with massive datasets.
• Statistical prowess: You’ve built, validated, and fine-tuned models. You know your way around a confusion matrix, ROC curves, clustering, classification, time series analysis, and deep learning techniques.
• Customer and product focus: You're driven by a passion for fintech and enhancing the banking experience. You ensure that your work directly contributes to business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Translate complex business problems into analytical questions, design and implement data-driven solutions for a variety of use cases.
• Develop and implement advanced machine learning models, such as credit scoring, behavioral analytics, and optimization models.
• Create analytics dashboards for actionable insights and reporting, improving decision-making processes.
• Manage end-to-end data science projects, including planning, execution, and post-implementation monitoring.
• Continuously improve data science practices, tools, and frameworks to ensure scalability and efficiency.
• Collaborate closely with product and engineering teams to integrate data models into core products.
• Present and explain findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, ensuring clarity and impact.
• Mentor junior data scientists and offer technical guidance to support team growth and success.

Qualifications

• Degree in a quantitative discipline: Mathematics, Statistics, Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering, or a related field. 
• 5+ years of experience specifically in a credit risk modeling or analytics role within banking, fintech, or a financial institution. 
• Familiarity with regulatory reporting frameworks.
• Solid understanding of statistical models, including their assumptions and limitations.
• Experience developing credit models in the Retail/SME space (e.g., credit cards, merchant analytics, fraud detection, underwriting scorecard).
• Strong proficiency in Python, R, or SQL; experience in multiple languages is a plus.
• Hands-on experience in the model development lifecycle (training, validation, tuning, monitoring.)
• Familiarity with data visualization tools such as Tableau and/or Metabase; dashboard creation experience is an advantage.
• Strong understanding of financial industry best practices.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) for data processing and model deployment is a plus.
• Strong understanding of data management principles and infrastructure is a plus.

Benefits

• Challenging role in a startup environment with strong growth ambitions.
• Opportunities for professional growth and development.
• A dynamic and innovative work environment.
• Competitive compensation and benefits

At Nikel, we are committed to diversity and equitable access to employment opportunities based on ability. We thank all applicants for their interest but will only contact candidates selected to advance in the hiring process.