AI Innovation and Development, Lead 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 

FICO is looking for a Lead AI Scientist to join a team building production-grade AI systems for some of the world's largest financial institutions. This is a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and one of the highest-stakes, most regulated environments in the industry where your models directly influence credit and fraud decisions affecting millions of people.

 What You’ll Contribute 

• Design, train, and evaluate advanced models from statistical and ML models to transformer-based models, LLMs, and generative AI to solve real-world problems across risk and fraud domains for enterprise applications at scale.

• Design and develop end-to-end model build lifecycle, establishing best practices for data design, model evaluation, observability, and responsible AI deployment in a highly regulated environment.

• Identify and pursue opportunities to drive model innovation, translating research ideas into production-ready solutions that enhance model performance and business value.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams of researchers, engineers, and product specialists across FICO to translate cutting-edge ideas into practical solutions from model design and development through to model deployment into FICO platform and go-live client support.

• Engage with clients and pre-sales team to demonstrate model capabilities, support client evaluations, and help drive model adoption by showcasing deep understanding of the market differentiating value of the FICO models.

What We’re Seeking 

• PhD or Master's in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related technical field, with hands-on experience in predictive modeling, and applied AI development and a demonstrated ability to work independently and drive problems to resolution.

• Deep hands-on understanding of ML models, transformer architectures, embeddings, and attention mechanisms, with the curiosity and critical reasoning to go beyond standard open-source framework usage including model training, fine-tuning, and adaptation to domain-specific problems.

• Demonstrated track record of taking end-to-end ownership of AI/ML solutions from research to production deployment, with open-source or research contributions such as publications, patents considered a strong plus.

• Strong competency in two or more programming languages (Python, Kotlin, Java, C, C++) and deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, DeepSpeed); familiarity with performance and deployment tools such as Triton is a plus. Comfortable working in a Linux environment.

• Proven ability to lead cross-functional teams on medium-to-large projects, taking accountability for outcomes and managing client interactions with strong communication skills.

• Experience deploying AI/ML solutions within highly regulated industries (e.g., financial services, healthcare, insurance) is a plus.

• Experience analyzing large, real-world datasets to understand their underlying context that applies to the model design and translate into effective model feature engineering. Prior experience with real-time payment fraud or risk transactional data, including data landscape knowledge and applicability to a problem domain across fraud and risk, is a plus.

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: $120,000 to $189,000 with this range reflecting differences in candidate knowledge, skills and experience.

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