Director of Data Science (Credit)

Join Mission Lane as the Director of Data Science, where you'll lead the strategy and technical direction for our credit acquisition models. You'll work closely with cross-functional teams and have a significant impact on our growth and underwriting goals. Enjoy a supportive work culture, comprehensive benefits, and opportunities for professional development.

• Lead the strategy and technical leadership behind Mission Lane's credit acquisition models, ensuring alignment with the company's growth and underwriting goals.
• Provide technical leadership for the data scientists building and maintaining acquisition models, setting the bar for model design, code quality, and production rigor.
• Ensure model risk and monitoring practices keep acquisition models compliant, explainable, and accurate as underwriting conditions change.

• You partner naturally with people outside data science, translating technical trade-offs into decisions the business can act on
• You can mentor and raise the technical bar for experienced data scientists without needing to be the smartest person in every room
• You've made predictions where the outcome doesn't show up for a year or more, and you build in the discipline that requires, including practicing sound model risk management
• You stay anchored to the business problem you're solving, keeping the modeling technique in service of the goal
• You're curious by nature, the kind of person who wants to understand how the pieces fit together
• Able to travel ~4-6+ times per year for high quality in-person collaboration
• Has direct experience hiring, coaching, and developing data scientists as their manager
• Writes tested, reviewed, reproducible code, for data pipelines and model training alike, and works fluently in the Python data stack
• Has a PhD in a quantitative field and 5+ years of experience in a related role, or a BS/MS in a quantitative field and 8+ years of experience in a related role
• Has applied data science to credit risk, underwriting, or another long-horizon, regulated prediction problem, such as insurance
• Has created, deployed, and managed supervised learning models in a production environment for high-impact applications
• Direct experience in consumer lending; credit card acquisitions, specifically
• Familiarity with Mission Lane's broader ML tooling ecosystem, including Chalk, BentoML, or DVC
• Experience partnering directly with executive leadership on modeling strategy