Senior Applied AI Research Scientist

Join Sardine, a leading company in fraud detection and risk management. As a Senior Applied AI Research Scientist, you will leverage your expertise in deep learning and foundation models to develop state-of-the-art fraud detection solutions. You will have the opportunity to drive the next generation of fraud foundation models and influence industry-wide adoption. This remote-first position offers a competitive salary, generous equity compensation, unlimited paid time off, and comprehensive health insurance coverage.

• Identifying and scoping opportunities for foundation model research and development, designing rigorous experiments, and executing on the roadmap.
• Owning the evaluation bar for foundation model performance, including offline benchmarks, time- and entity-aware holdouts, calibration, drift and degradation monitoring.
• Partnering with Engineering on training infrastructure, GPU efficiency, feature and embedding stores, and serving at production scale.

• Hands-on self-supervised pre training experience, plus practical fine-tuning and adaptation
• 4+ years in applied machine learning, quantitative modeling, or ML engineering including at least one foundation model you pre trained or substantially adapted and put in front of real traffic
• Strong Python, strong SQL, and comfort preparing very large datasets
• Production experience with model serving, versioning, monitoring, and rollback
• Ability to self-manage and drive ambiguous applied research projects with clear communication with partner teams across data science, engineering, product, marketing and external partners
• Background in fraud, AML, payments, credit, or adversarial machine learning
• Experience building and evaluating LLM-based agents in production
• Publications, released models, or open source contributions in representation learning or sequence modeling
• Experience with model risk management and documentation in a regulated financial environment