Analytic Science Principal Scientist

FICO (NYSE: FICO) is a leading global analytics software company, helping businesses in 100+ countries make better decisions. Join our world-class team today and fulfill your career potential!

The Opportunity

"As a principal scientist, you’ll have a unique opportunity to build, train and deploy FICO’s diverse range of Foundational AI models. As part of our dynamic team, your expertise will play a crucial role in shaping the technology and architecture of our latest innovations, which encompasses domains across natural language, transactional, speech, vision and other modalities." – Senior Director, Analytic Science

What You’ll Contribute

• Design and advance AI models and system innovations in close collaboration with cross-functional teams—including Product Management, Software Engineering, and Pre-Sales—to ensure high-quality performance and delivery.

• Develop Focused Language Models, which are custom LLMs designed to solve our customers’ business problems in areas such as fraud, collections, financial services operations, financial education and FICO Platform software.  Creation of novel architectures (transformers and others), optimizing distributed training pipelines (Pytorch/CUDA) for efficient pre-training, domain specific datasets, business-relevant benchmarks. 

• IP creation of algorithms and systems, leading to patent filing.  FICO’s research efforts are focused around IP creation and patents to offer differentiated algorithms and systems to deliver high-value client solutions.  Areas of particular interest are explainable and responsible AI. 

• Communicating to high-level stakeholders internally and externally.

• Conduct hands-on analysis of large historical datasets to identify the best modeling techniques, demonstrating expertise in various algorithms and modeling processes with cutting-edge analytic techniques.

• Guide and mentor scientists to support their career development.

• Drive innovation and inorganic growth of new and existing analytic products through offering and promoting refined ideas.

What We’re Seeking

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or related fields.

• Excellent software engineering skills, experience in Python, Rust and/or C++. 

• Experience with pre/post training of modern AI architectures (transformers, encoders, decoders, diffusion).

• Real-world experience with distributed systems and concurrency.

• Experience with Reinforcement Learning (RL).

• Prior experience managing, scaling and delivering high-quality, on-time AI/ML projects.

• Requires full-time on-site presence at the FICO San Diego, CA.

• Willingness to travel up to 10%.

Our Offer to You

• An inclusive culture strongly reflecting our core values:  Act Like an Owner, Delight Our Customers and Earn the Respect of Others.

• The opportunity to make an impact and develop professionally by leveraging your unique strengths and participating in valuable learning experiences.

• Highly competitive compensation, benefits and rewards programs that encourage you to bring your best every day and be recognized for doing so.

• An engaging, people-first work environment offering work/life balance, employee resource groups, and social events to promote interaction and camaraderie.

• The targeted base pay range for this role is: $167,000 to $262,000 with this range reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills and experience.

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Why Make a Move to FICO?

At FICO, you can develop your career with a leading organization in one of the fastest-growing fields in technology today – Big Data analytics.  You’ll play a part in our commitment to help businesses use data to improve every choice they make, using advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, optimization, and much more.

FICO makes a real difference in the way businesses operate worldwide:

•    Credit Scoring — FICO® Scores are used by 90 of the top 100 US lenders.

•    Fraud Detection and Security — 4 billion payment cards globally are protected by FICO fraud systems.

•    Lending — 3/4 of US mortgages are approved using the FICO