Machine Learning Lead (Fintech)

Location: Chicago, United States; on-site

Salary: $225,000–$275,000 USD base salary per year, plus performance bonus and equity.

Company

hirify.global is a fintech payment service provider using stablecoins, AI-driven fraud prevention, instant settlement, global pay-ins, multi-currency FX, and unified payouts for marketplaces, fintechs, remittance providers, gaming platforms, and ecommerce merchants.

What you will do

• Lead the first dedicated ML team and own the fraud and risk intelligence layer.
• Build, deploy, monitor, and iterate production fraud models using transaction and behavioral data.
• Improve approval rates, authorization decisioning, merchant underwriting, fraud detection, and chargeback outcomes.
• Define and track fraud and risk metrics, including detection rate, false positive rate, chargeback rate, and dispute win rate.
• Discover emerging fraud signals and attack patterns across global payment methods.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Operations to embed fraud intelligence into payment flows and internal tooling.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in machine learning, applied data science, or production ML.
• Demonstrated experience building fraud models on the acquiring side of payments, such as at an acquirer, PSP, or payment facilitator.
• Experience taking ML projects from proof of concept through production deployment.
• Strong knowledge of authorization fraud, card-not-present fraud, friendly fraud, chargebacks, merchant risk, statistics, and feature engineering on high-volume financial data.
• Ability to own ambiguous problems end-to-end and collaborate across Engineering, Product, and Operations.

Nice to have

• Experience at an acquirer, ISO, PayFac, or payments infrastructure company.
• Experience scaling MLOps pipelines, retraining schedules, and real-time monitoring systems.
• Familiarity with card network rules, dispute workflows, fraud liability frameworks, and real-time fraud scoring.
• Experience as an early or sole ML hire, or with stablecoin, crypto, and alternative payment rails.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to build core fraud and risk infrastructure during a rapid growth phase.
• Competitive compensation with performance bonus and meaningful ownership.
• Health and wellness benefits.
• 401(k) savings plan and flexible time off.
• Collaborative and innovative work environment with direct impact on company direction.