Data Scientist, Parafin
$190-220k
+ Equity grant
Embedded financial services for SMBs
Open for applications
Embedded financial services for SMBs
21-100 employees
Open for applications
$190-220k
+ Equity grant
21-100 employees
Company mission
To democratize access to growth capital.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor's Degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Data Science (or related fields)
- Statistical Reasoning
- 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
- Business Acumen
- 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
- Engineering Mindset
- Write legible, reliable, and tested code
- Build or source tools to boost the team’s efficiency
- Contribute to model and data infrastructure design
- Leadership and Collaboration
- Model Parafin’s values of efficiency, intellectual honesty, accountability, and empathy
- Build trusted relationships with stakeholders
- Document work, seek feedback, and share learnings proactively
- Focused Execution
- Prioritize high-impact use of your time
- Scope projects rigorously
- Act with urgency
What the job involves
- Enthusiasm, skepticism, and respect for data are in our DNA – two of our co-founders were PhD data scientists at Robinhood
- Since our founding, we have grown the team to include perspectives from graduate studies in physics, mathematics, bioengineering, economics, financial engineering, and electrical engineering and professional experience at Robinhood, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Faire, Segment, Facebook, and Google
- 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. Our scope includes:
- Go-To-Market: We collaborate with our sales leaders to convey the value of embedded finance to prospective partners. Example projects:
- Identifying the impact of financial access on platform GMV using quasi-random variation
- Running simulations to assess the risk of offering financial products on specific platforms
- Portfolio Monitoring and Servicing: We develop tooling to maintain portfolio health, driving sustainable growth for Parafin, our capital markets partners, and the small businesses we serve. Example projects:
- Estimating survival curves to predict cohorted loss rates
- Deploying LLM-based models to automatically identify bankruptcy from web data
- Product and Growth: We drive strategic decision-making and product design at the highest levels of the company. Example projects:
- Designing experiments to increase offer size for low-risk merchants
- Building tools to instrument and diagnose user behavior in our application flow
- Underwriting: We build models and systems to decide which SMBs receive offers for each financial product and on what terms. Example projects:
- Training a quantile regression model to forecast the distribution of SMB revenues and precisely size our financing offers
- Applying convex optimization to generate competitive financing offers
- 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
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 values
- Empathy: Be kind and open minded
- Efficiency: be results-oriented
- Accountability: Show up and be responsible
- Intellectual Honesty: Seek truth and give feedback
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Articles
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.
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