Sr. Data Scientist (Remote)

We are looking for a Sr. Data Scientist to join Fingerhut, a market leading FinTech whose mission is to help its customers establish, build, or rebuild their credit! This role will be either remote or based out of our Eden Prairie office which operates in a hybrid work setting. The Senior Data Scientist will follow our internal Machine Learning model development process, such as data handling, target variable definition/analysis, segmentation consideration, algorithm selection, stress testing, and so on. This person will be responsible for performing complex ML model development and/or analysis aimed at improving portfolio risk, profitability, performance forecasting and operational performance for consumer products and the related divisions such as credit cards.

Fingerhut has set becoming an ‘Employer of Choice’ as one of its four ‘Transformation’ goals to kick-off in 2022. After two years of pandemic, the ‘great resignation’, highly competitive Minneapolis and national labor market given the ability to work remotely leadership recognizes that the employee experience has to be greatly enhanced from acquisition through development to lead to retention.

The Senior Data Scientist will also have the freedom to pursue their own ideas and experiment to identify interesting patterns and trends in the data. This person will have the opportunity to conduct advanced research activities such as improving existing algorithms, developing new ones, or designing methodologies. The Senior Data Scientist requires being the subject matter expert on multiple business-related and technical-related topics and an ability to independently drive strategic improvements. The Senior Data Scientist may have opportunity to lead a small team of data scientists.

Duties And Responsibilities

• Develop and/or implement machine learning models for predictive purposes
• Validate and improve models for roll-out and analyze the performance of existing models
• Assess and implement the usefulness of new data sources, transformations, and modeling techniques
• Perform high quality, data driven statistical inference
• Mine large datasets in multiple databases to draw patterns and inferences to build models and arm leaders with information that will help make business decisions
• Support end-users to design strategies based on newly developed machine learning models
• Conduct advanced analysis and identify business opportunity
• Test, evaluate, and deploy new models and features to achieve better outcomes for key metrics
• Work collaboratively with other data scientists, our engineering team, and business stakeholders to craft solutions with a holistic view of the problem
• Unsupervised learning methods to augment existing supervised models, or detect portfolio anomalies
• Presentation of work to all levels of the organization including senior leadership, translate data and models into a compelling story that business leaders will easily understand
• May lead a small team to develop ML models and conduct complex analysis
• Other duties and projects as assigned
  

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Data Science, Information Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Computer Science, Data Mining, Applied Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, Econometrics, or other technology/quantitative/hard science program.
• Minimum 3+ years of hands-on experience in data science and/or analytics
• Must be proficient in one/or more of the following: Python, R, Spark, Scala, SQL, or other analytical/mathematical/statistical programming environment.
• In-depth knowledge of supervised and/or unsupervised model building techniques, such as: neural networks, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), support vector machines (SVM), gradient boosted models (GBM), and random forest.
• Hands on experience with information retrieval from high dimensional data, dimensionality reduction and feature extraction.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s or PhD degree
• Commitment to creating reproducible and well-documented code
• Analytical and results oriented, independent thinker and strong problem solver
• Experience leading data science projects that have a direct impact on company objectives
• SAS, model governance process experience, and experience with some popular ML model development platforms such as StagMaker or Domino
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to summarize and communicate results from complex analysis clearly; experience presenting analysis to senior leadership
• Demonstrated ability to work independently and collaboratively as a team
• Welcomes a diverse and inclusive work environment
  

About Us

BLST Operating Company (Bluestem Brands) is a group of FinTech and eCommerce Retail businesses led by our Northstar and Orchard Portfolios. This position falls under the Northstar Portfolio, which is led by Fingerhut – a long-standing fintech company. Fingerhut fuses our extensive years of data modeling and real-time analytics through machine learning to provide flexible payment options for our valued customers looking to establish, build, or rebuild credit. Qualifying customers use their accounts for e-Commerce purchases at fingerhut.com for everything they and their family need across a broad selection of national brands.

At Fingerhut, you’ll find responsive and supportive leaders who empower our employees, knowing they drive our success. We are continually innovating and improving, challenging ourselves to take risks, learn from mistakes, and celebrate success as a team. We also grow careers, giving employees on-the-job stretch assignments, lateral moves to expand knowledge bases, and promotional opportunities that help to accelerate development.