Data Scientist, Parafin
Underwriting
More information about location
3-5 days a week in office
Embedded financial services for SMBs
Be an early applicant
Embedded financial services for SMBs
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
3-5 days a week in office
21-100 employees
Company mission
To democratize access to growth capital.
Role
Who you are
- Approach data analysis with a critical, intellectually honest eye
- Design concise metrics that guide decision making
- Employ robust experimental design and 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
- Architect technical systems that are highly scalable, reliable, and observable
- Model Parafin’s values of efficiency, intellectual honesty, accountability, and empathy
- Build trusted relationships with stakeholders
- Document work, seek feedback, and share learnings proactively
- Prioritize high-impact use of your time
- Scope projects rigorously
- Act with urgency
What the job involves
- Data science is integral to Parafin’s mission
- Our platform partnerships and lending history provide rich insights into the financial health of small businesses around the world
- This empowers 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 our business
- The underwriting team builds and relentlessly improves the systems that determine eligibility, sizing, and pricing for Parafin lending products
- Every dollar originated by the company is derived from underwriting’s business-critical assets
- Our work ensures that Parafin stands out among lenders for its distinctive ability to use data and technology, and deliver a highly automated, accurate, and fair lending experience
- Our team partners closely with leaders across the company to shape what is possible: how can we make our underwriting more reliable?
- What data is most important to collect, to provide the best outcomes and growth?
- What new markets and products should we expand into?
- We look for teammates who balance the creativity and courage to implement new ideas, with the scientific rigor that helps ensure those ideas succeed
- Training a quantile regression model to forecast the distribution of SMB revenues and precisely size our financing offers
- Using LLMs to help build a risk model and forecast that lets us underwrite merchants on banking transaction data
- Performing risk-based pricing optimization and experimentation
- Collaborating with engineering to build a modular real-time underwriting system
- Building a simulation platform to model and evaluate conversion and risk exposure across varied configurations for our financing offers
- Ingesting new data sources from both 3rd parties and partner platforms, and evaluate their use in improving our risk predictions
- 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
- You’ll own the full data-science lifecycle, from research to deployment, to power our underwriting engine. Specifically, you will:
- Design, train, and deploy production underwriting models
- Design experiments and metrics to drive risk and pricing decisions
- Partner with engineering and product teams to architect automated underwriting systems
- Identify business opportunities to improve growth and profitability via improvements to our underwriting posture
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.
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