Lead Data Scientist (Fintech)

Location: Sofia, Bulgaria — office; Varna, Bulgaria — hybrid.

Company

hirify.global provides payment and commerce solutions, including multicurrency accounts and e-commerce tools, for businesses.

What you will do

• Lead and line manage the data science team while setting priorities, supporting development, managing performance, and remaining hands-on.
• Set standards for experimentation, validation, documentation, deployment, code reviews, model reviews, and technical design.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of models from discovery and feature engineering through training, production deployment, A/B testing where appropriate, and monitoring.
• Develop models for churn, customer lifecycle management, cross-sell and upsell, customer behavior, fraud detection, and risk management.
• Lead ML pipelines and MLOps practices in partnership with Data Engineering, including training, evaluation, deployment, serving, performance monitoring, data drift, and data quality monitoring.
• Partner with senior stakeholders and communicate findings and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences; contribute to LLM-powered agentic workflows where they solve a clear business problem.

Requirements

• 6+ years of hands-on applied data science, machine learning, or statistical modelling experience in a commercial setting, with a track record of production models that were shipped, measured, and delivered business impact.
• Experience leading or mentoring data scientists, guiding their approach, and reviewing models and code.
• Strong Python skills and practical experience with common machine learning libraries such as NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost, or LightGBM.
• Experience leading production models for customer behavioral analysis, churn and retention prediction, propensity or uplift modelling, and/or risk and fraud detection.
• Comfort working with large-scale structured and semi-structured data; proficiency in SQL and cloud data warehouses. GCP and BigQuery are strongly preferred, while similar technologies are welcome.
• Experience deploying and operating ML models in production, including model serving and monitoring, and working with Data Engineering to deliver reliable solutions.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, including influencing senior stakeholders, scoping ambiguous business needs into data science problems, and turning statistical findings into actionable insights.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, payments, banking, or e-commerce.
• Experience helping an early-stage Data Science function establish practices and standards.
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools such as Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, or KubeFlow.
• Experience with LLMs, RAG pipelines, or tool-use agents and taking them to production.
• Senior data scientists ready to take on people-management responsibilities are welcome.

Culture & Benefits

• International team operating in a hi-tech environment with teambuilding, social activities, and multinational networking.
• Annual salary reviews, promotions, performance bonuses, referral bonuses, and an annual individual training and development budget.
• Access to hirify.global Academy and LinkedIn Learning courses.
• 25 days of annual paid leave, increasing by one day per year up to 30 days.
• Luxury health insurance including dental and optical coverage, meal vouchers worth 102.26 EUR per month, and a fully covered Multisport card.
• Fully covered public transport pass for Sofia, plus free office coffee, snacks, and drinks.

Hiring process

• Apply using the form and submit a CV in English.
• Applications are reviewed confidentially; only shortlisted candidates are contacted.