About this role
Leading the data work for a product area within the Grant business, you will set the questions worth answering, build the evidence, and drive what happens next alongside area leads. You will bring a staff-level view to Grant-wide conversations while helping establish technical direction and best practices for data science across Kikoff.
Operating within a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company experiencing rapid growth, you will join a dedicated team of three data scientists embedded full-time with Grant, Kikoff's fastest-growing business line. The team ensures every product makes a clear promise, delivers on it reliably, and turns durable value into a healthy business model. Your scope includes shaping how AI agents become a core part of the analysis loop, from exploration to pipelines and experiment readouts.
An ideal candidate is someone who demonstrates extreme ownership, clear communication, craftsmanship, and a desire to create lasting work. You thrive in a consumer fintech startup environment, partnering closely with business, product, engineering, design, and marketing leads to guide strategic decisions and drive measurable impact for millions of customers.
What you will do
- Lead the data work for a Grant product area by determining valuable questions, building evidence, and directing subsequent actions.
- Define and maintain the measurement system for your designated product area while contributing to the broader Grant measurement framework.
- Own product experimentation for your area, covering design, guardrails, analysis, and recommendations for rollouts and policy changes.
- Build and evaluate models where appropriate, including proof-of-concept development, offline evaluation, and production monitoring in partnership with engineering.
- Partner with the Grant business lead and area leads to shape the product roadmap, define success metrics, and establish criteria for stopping initiatives.
- Contribute staff-level guidance to technical direction, experimentation standards, AI tooling usage, and peer review processes across the entire Kikoff data science organization.
What you need
- Experience partnering with product, engineering, and marketing peers across strategy, goal setting, approach, and execution.
- A proven track record of defining metrics from scratch and aligning a team to operate on them.
- Demonstrated experience designing and running experimentation programs, including scenarios where clean randomization is unavailable.
- Comfort using quasi-experimental and causal inference methods alongside an understanding of their limitations.
- Proficiency with production-quality SQL and Python for building pipelines, analyses, and models independently.
- Experience building or working closely with models that drive product decisions across domains such as ranking, fraud, forecasting, personalization, underwriting, or detection.
- Active use of AI tools in daily analytical work to accelerate and improve the quality of delivered outputs.
- Ability to drive decisions using data in front of executive audiences, even when the data contradicts the current plan.
Nice to have
- Consumer fintech experience, especially products that expand access for un- and under-banked customers
- Built an experimentation or causal inference practice in an organization that previously lacked one
- Taken a model from proof of concept to production, or shipped test and challenger models that altered a product decision
- Prior staff or tech-lead scope involving setting direction for other individual contributors and owning a domain data strategy
- 8+ years in data science or analytics
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the salary range for this role?
The base salary range is $265,000 to $306,000 USD.
What is the team structure for this role?
You would be the fourth data scientist focused on the Grant business, operating as part of a team of three data scientists embedded full time with Grant within Kikoff's larger data organization.
What are the expectations regarding AI tooling?
AI tools are expected to be a core part of your daily analytical work, and you should be able to show how they changed the speed and quality of what you ship.
What business unit will this role support?
This role supports Grant, which is Kikoff's fastest growing business line focused on earned wage access and short-term liquidity.