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Senior Data Scientist, First Line Risk

Block· 10109 Risk - Risk ML & DS
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Bay Area, CA$178.2k - $297kfull-timePosted 2w ago

About the role

Senior Data Scientist responsible for building and scaling control performance monitoring within Block's First Line Risk data science function. Owns metric design, monitoring modules, and collaboration with risk, compliance, product, and engineering to measure risk exposure and improve risk management across controls and products.

Responsibilities

  • Define and maintain actionable control performance metrics and key risk indicators that connect control objectives, risk exposure, and customer outcomes to clear decisions for first line owners and compliance partners
  • Investigate how controls work in practice, using source data and system behavior to measure coverage, enforcement, exceptions, and outcomes, and identify where instrumentation or evidence is incomplete
  • Contribute scalable monitoring metrics and modules into our monitoring application, connecting metrics to risks and controls and helping teams identify emerging risks and prioritize the most consequential monitoring gaps
  • Turn high-value one-off analyses into reusable analytical modules and automated monitoring workflows that scale across controls and products
  • Apply statistical judgment to define populations, cohorts, baselines, and thresholds, and calibrate monitoring to detect meaningful changes while managing false positives and data quality limitations
  • Build repeatable solutions for product governance, including pre-launch risk measurement plans, rollout guardrails, and post-launch monitoring of control performance and risk outcomes
  • Partner with internal users to understand their decisions and workflows, shape a monitoring roadmap, and measure the value of solutions through adoption and improvements in risk management
  • Lead ambiguous initiatives from problem definition through delivery, aligning stakeholders on the vision, tradeoffs, ownership, and actions that monitoring should support
  • Communicate findings and evidence limitations clearly to technical partners, control owners, compliance teams, and senior leaders, and contribute reusable methods and technical guidance for other data scientists

Qualifications

  • A bachelor's degree in statistics, data science, economics, computer science, or a similar quantitative field with 7+ years of relevant experience; a master's degree with 5+ years; or a PhD with 3+ years
  • A track record of leading analytical solutions from problem definition through production use and adoption, including multi-person or cross-team efforts
  • Advanced proficiency in SQL and Python, including experience working with large datasets and building maintainable analytical code, reusable modules, and automated data workflows
  • Strong statistical and analytical judgment, including experience with cohort analysis, experimentation, time series, or monitoring, and the ability to recognize selection bias, incomplete data, and misleading metrics
  • Experience translating business, policy, or control objectives into measurement frameworks that help stakeholders assess performance and take action
  • Strong product instincts for internal tools, including the ability to understand stakeholder needs, prioritize by impact, and evaluate whether a solution improves how teams work and manage risk
  • Excellent judgment in ambiguous situations, with the ability to make practical tradeoffs, build stakeholder alignment, and execute across teams
  • Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain complex analytical findings, uncertainty, and recommendations to technical and nontechnical audiences
  • Experience in financial technology, risk, compliance, or product governance, or demonstrated ability to learn complex domains and apply rigorous measurement to them
  • Experience using AI tools to accelerate analysis and development, validate conclusions, and automate repeatable analytical work

Skills

Required:control performance metricsSQLPythonstatistics and data analysis

Benefits

  • Remote work
  • medical insurance
  • flexible time off
  • retirement savings plans
  • modern family planning
  • Check out our other benefits at Block.
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Block

Block builds technology to increase access to the global economy.

Made up of Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Bitkey, and Proto, Block, Inc. builds technology to increase access to the global economy.

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