Data Scientist, Parafin
$200-330k
+ Equity grant. Senior/Staff Level: $235k - $330k+
Embedded financial services for SMBs
Be an early applicant
Embedded financial services for SMBs
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$200-330k
+ Equity grant. Senior/Staff Level: $235k - $330k+
101-200 employees
Company mission
To democratise access to growth capital.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor's Degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Data Science (or related fields). We believe the most effective data scientists bring the following skills to their work:
- Approach data analysis with a critical, intellectually honest eye
- Design concise metrics that guide decision making
- Use robust causal inference methods
- Develop valid and predictive machine learning models
- Identify and effectively prioritize business problems
- Solve business problems using appropriate data science techniques
- Anticipate the impact of your work on our financial performance, customers, and compliance obligations
- Write legible, reliable, and tested code
- Build or source tools to boost the team's efficiency
- Contribute to model and data infrastructure design
- Model Parafin's values of efficiency, intellectual honesty, accountability, and empathy
- Build trusted relationships with stakeholders
- Document work, seek feedback, and share learnings proactively
- Mentor other DS members on the team
- Management experience, a plus!
- Prioritize high-impact use of your time
- Scope projects rigorously
- Act with urgency
- Rapidly learn and adopt emerging AI tools and workflows to accelerate analysis
- Critically evaluate AI-generated outputs for accuracy and reliability
What the job involves
- Data is core to Parafin's mission to grow small businesses. Our platform partnerships and portfolio provide rich insight into SMB financial health, allowing us to create fair, automated, and broad access to financial services. As Parafin scales, the breadth and depth of our data grows with it, amplifying the impact we can have on customers and the trajectory of the business
- Our mission is to help Parafin succeed by leveraging the vast data that powers our platform. Our team partners closely with leaders across the company to drive impact. This role's scope includes:
- Growth: We design experiments and analyses that expand access to capital while keeping the portfolio healthy. Example projects:
- Designing experiments that navigate the tradeoff between growth and risk — expanding access to capital while keeping the portfolio healthy
- Studying the full merchant lifecycle — first offer, repayment, repeat capital — to find where we can responsibly extend more
- Modeling how a prospective partner's portfolio would perform on our platform, so we can size new opportunities before launching
- Portfolio Monitoring & Servicing: We build models and tooling that forecast portfolio performance and measure the impact of our servicing efforts on merchant outcomes. Example projects:
- Building and shipping ML models (XGBoost and friends) that forecast merchant repayment behavior — from feature engineering through production deployment — to inform how we price and size offers
- Measuring whether our servicing actually works — how much balance we recover after reaching out to a struggling merchant, and what interventions move the needle
- Infrastructure: We build the data pipelines, automated systems, and internal tools that let the rest of the company operate at scale. Example projects:
- Building the data pipelines that power every analysis, dashboard, and ML model across the company
- Automating processes — lien filings, KYC checks, fraud screens — using APIs, ML, and LLMs
- Building internal tools — Streamlit apps, dashboards, Slack bots — that the rest of the company uses every day
- Beyond these focus areas, our team helps expand our impact by recruiting exceptional talent, improving our tools, and supporting each other through regular seminars and project reviews
- You will make an outsized impact on Parafin's trajectory by leading projects from end to end. You will quickly learn new methods, apply them across diverse areas of the business, and implement them robustly. You will develop expertise in specific areas of the business, but may tackle projects across domains as our priorities evolve
Our take
Parafin is a fintech platform helping SMBs access growth capital. It targets platforms where SMBs sell and transact and offers an embedded finance solution with which these platforms can offer loans ranging from $500 to $10M. Parafin provides the capital for these loans and assumes the risk, allowing platforms to offer competitively attractive incentives to help them draw in a larger proportion of the growing SMB market.
Parafin’s focus on SMB growth funding is canny. Most worldwide businesses fall into the SMB category, but funding access for these businesses shrunk dramatically post-pandemic when traditional banks became more conservative with their loan approvals. This exacerbates SMB cash-flow issues, which reportedly already account for more than four in five SMB failures.
This means Parafin is helping platforms fill a growing and crucial market niche. With leadership from former Robinhood employees, confident funding from major players including the founders of Robinhood, DoorDash, and Plaid, and partnerships with Amazon, Parafin looks poised to net a substantial and lucrative market.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
77% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Dec 2024
$100m
LATE VC
Aug 2022
$60m
SERIES B
Total funding: $190m
Company benefits
- Health, dental, & vision
- 401k plan
- Parental leave
- Unlimited PTO
- Commuter benefits
- Free in-office lunches
- Mental health & well-being
- Special recognition
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Sahill Poddar
(Co-Founder & CEO)Completed a PhD in Particle Physics at CERN, before working as a Data Scientist with LiquidM and Facebook, then finally heading up Machine Learning Engineering at Robinhood.
Ralph Furmaniak
(Co-Founder)Completed a PhD in Analytic Number Theory at Stanford, before working as a Robinhood Data Scientist, and then as Chief Scientist at Numerai.
Vineet Goel
(Co-Founder & CPO)Worked as a Carnegie Mellon Teaching Assistant, before moving into a Software Engineer role at Quantifind, and then heading up Risk and Fraud Engineering at Robinhood.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 22 more jobs at Parafin