Lead Data Scientist, Fraud Modelling

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Company

hirify.global is a commerce partnership marketing platform connecting brands with affiliates, influencers, content publishers, ambassadors, and customer advocates.

What you will do

• Research fraud detection and risk monitoring across attribution, lead fraud, click injection, browser extension abuse, brand safety, and creator authenticity.
• Design, prototype, validate, and deploy machine learning models and rule-based systems for fraud detection, partner risk scoring, compliance, and trust and safety workflows.
• Apply graph-based methods such as community detection, link analysis, and behavioral clustering to identify coordinated fraud rings and suspicious network patterns.
• Own production ML delivery across ETL, feature engineering, training, deployment, monitoring, retraining, and drift detection.
• Analyze fraud trends and partner behavior, improve precision and recall, reduce false positives, and communicate risk metrics to leadership.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, MLOps, Compliance, Trust & Safety, Marketing, and Finance teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, or advanced analytics, including 2+ years focused on fraud detection, risk modeling, or anomaly detection in production.
• Demonstrated experience building and deploying fraud or risk models using classification, anomaly detection, time-series analysis, or graph-based methods.
• Strong Python and SQL skills, with experience using machine learning libraries such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, or LightGBM.
• Experience with feature engineering, model evaluation, imbalanced datasets, production ML workflows, monitoring, A/B testing, and retraining.
• Strong statistics, machine learning, experimentation, analytical, and stakeholder communication skills.
• Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field such as computer science, statistics, mathematics, or engineering.

Nice to have

• Experience with affiliate marketing, ad tech, e-commerce fraud, browser extension detection, fingerprinting, or device and user identity resolution.
• Experience with graph analytics, privacy-preserving machine learning, real-time scoring, REST APIs, or streaming pipelines.
• Familiarity with GCP tools such as BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Cloud Run, or with Databricks and Spark.
• Exposure to rule engines, decision trees, or hybrid rule-based and machine learning systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible working environment with a responsible paid time off policy.
• Up to 12 fully covered therapy or coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage.
• Monthly gym reimbursement and support for physical well-being.
• Restricted Stock Units with a three-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Free Coursera subscription, PXA courses, paid parental leave, home-office technology stipend, and monthly internet allowance.