Senior Research Scientist, Personal Loans

The Team:

Upstart’s Machine Learning team has a direct impact on our company's success. The team consists of Research Scientists, Data Scientists, ML Engineers and other highly specialized roles. As a whole, the Machine Learning team builds, enables and evaluates our core production models.

Because our challenges are so new, members of our Machine Learning team need strong creative problem-solving skills and the technical background to implement solutions. Our research environment affords team members the opportunity to utilize a variety of statistical and machine learning methods with the freedom and encouragement to pursue alternative approaches to solving problems. Whether developing new products or identifying novel approaches to core models, we are continuously seeking the next big ideas to move our business forward.

This role sits on the Personal Loans Underwriting team. This is the team that is directly responsible for building and maintaining the models that evaluate the true risk of every applicant. The Personal Loan Underwriting ML team is responsible for researching and building these models and therefore have a direct impact on our company’s success.

The team is part of the Machine Learning organization and consists of Research Scientists, Data Scientists, ML Engineers and other highly specialized roles.

The Role:

As a Senior Research Scientist with Upstart, you'll leverage technical and business acumen to become an expert in our models and how the models interact with the business. Identify potential problems or opportunities for improvement, communicate these issues to the team, stakeholders and suggest solutions. This involves self-directed investigation into our business and its data, designing and preparing regular reports, as well as conducting ad hoc analyses for the Machine Learning team, company leadership, and external business partners. You’ll also have an opportunity to work alongside a talented team that values curiosity, humility, drive and teamwork.  

• Position Location - This role is available in the following locations: Columbus, Austin, San Mateo, or Remote 
• Time Zone Requirements - This team operates on either the East, Central, or West Coast time zones.
• Travel Requirements - This team has regular on-site collaboration sessions six times annually split between our San Mateo or Columbus office locations. If you need to travel to make these meetups, Upstart will cover all travel related expenses.

 How you’ll make an impact:

• Experience in autonomous research and development of high impact production models in the real world
• Full-stack expertise with all steps of the modeling process from ideation to productionalizing code; OR deep expertise in either statistical modeling or machine learning
• Programming expertise with Python with proficiency in writing clear, bug-free and well-documented code that runs well and is easily understood
• Work with product, engineering, and operations to ensure our decisioning system and data storage is transparent and provides everything needed for analysis of models and experiments.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or related experience in a production setting
• 2+years experience in machine learning or adjacent field.
• Familiarity with modern predictive modeling techniques (XGBoost, artificial neural networks)
• Experience with Python or R and SQL
• Knowledge in applied statistical methods (e.g., AB testing, hypothesis testing, linear and logistic regression)
• Excellent quantitative critical thinking skills
• Excellent communication skills

Preferred qualifications:

• 4+ years of experience in machine learning or adjacent field.
• Advanced degree in quantitative area of study such as statistics, operations research, finance, mathematics, or related field.
• Capable of leading team members on technical best practices, providing constructive feedback and mentoring to junior team members; ability to provide comprehensive and useful design and methodology reviews for ML projects.
• Experience in building visualizations and maintaining Dashboards (Plotly or Matplotlib) to track model performance
• Serving as an expert in the areas of experimental testing, Causal Inference, A/B testing or Hypothesis testing

What you’ll love: 

• Competitive Compensation (base + bonus & equity)
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Personal Development and Technology & Ergonomic Budgets 
• Life insurance and disability benefits 
• Clubs and Activities  (Game Nights, Fitstarters, Superwomen, Book Club, Investing Club, Money Discussions, Photography Club and Basketball teams) 
• Generous vacation policy
• 401(k) and Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Catered lunches + snacks & drinks

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