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Senior Applied AI Research Scientist

Sardine· Data Science
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RemoteFull-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

Applied research scientist focused on foundation models and deep learning for fraud detection, leveraging rich behavioral and device data to develop next-generation fraud foundation models and drive industry adoption.

Responsibilities

  • Identify and scope opportunities, design rigorous experiments, and execute on the roadmap for foundation model research and development.
  • Own the evaluation bar for foundation model performance: offline benchmarks, time- and entity-aware holdouts, calibration, drift and degradation monitoring, and head-to-head comparisons against strong classical baselines.
  • Take models the full distance from data prep and tokenization through pretraining, fine-tuning, distillation, quantization, and deployment behind a real-time inference path with tight latency budgets.
  • Partner with Engineering on training infrastructure, GPU efficiency, feature and embedding stores, and serving at production scale
  • Work directly with client-facing teams and customers to turn model capabilities and limits into decisions their risk teams can act on.
  • Partner with Legal, Compliance, and customer model risk teams to build the explainability, documentation, and governance our bank and fintech customers need to satisfy regulators.

Qualifications

  • 4+ years in applied machine learning, quantitative modeling, or ML engineering including at least one foundation model you pre trained or substantially adapted and put in front of real traffic
  • Hands-on self-supervised pre training experience, plus practical fine-tuning and adaptation
  • Production experience with model serving, versioning, monitoring, and rollback
  • Ability to self-manage and drive ambiguous applied research projects with clear communication with partner teams across data science, engineering, product, marketing and external partners
  • Strong Python, strong SQL, and comfort preparing very large datasets

Skills

Required:Foundation model developmentDeep learningSelf-supervised learningModel evaluation & monitoringProduction ML systemsPythonSQL

Benefits

  • Generous compensation in cash and equity
  • Early exercise for all options, including pre-vested
  • Work from anywhere: Remote-first Culture
  • Flexible paid time off and Year-end break
  • Health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents - US and Canada specific
  • 4% matching in 401k / RRSP - US and Canada specific
  • MacBook Pro delivered to your door
  • One-time stipend to set up a home office — desk, chair, screen, etc.
  • Monthly meal stipend
  • Monthly social meet-up stipend
  • Annual health and wellness stipend
  • Annual Learning stipend
Last updated Oct 1, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Sardine

The AI risk platform for fraud, credit, and compliance

Sardine’s AI platform is at the core of enterprise risk and fraud workflows, allowing them to consolidate vendors and improve operational efficiency. Hundreds of enterprises in over 70 countries trust Sardine to stop fraud in real-time, streamline BSA/AML compliance, and unify data across risk teams.

fraud preventionKYC/AMLTransaction monitoringBot detectionScams and ATOCard issuing fraudAML MonitoringCustomer dashboard
Company profileWebsite

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