Staff Machine Learning Modeler, Financial Crimes

Company Description

It all started with an idea at Block in 2013. Initially built to take the pain out of peer-to-peer payments, Cash App has gone from a simple product with a single purpose to a dynamic ecosystem, developing unique financial products, including Afterpay/Clearpay, to provide a better way to send, spend, invest, borrow and save to our 47 million monthly active customers. We want to redefine the world’s relationship with money to make it more relatable, instantly available, and universally accessible.

Today, Cash App has thousands of employees working globally across office and remote locations, with a culture geared toward innovation, collaboration and impact. We’ve been a distributed team since day one, and many of our roles can be done remotely from the countries where Cash App operates. No matter the location, we tailor our experience to ensure our employees are creative, productive, and happy.

Check out our locations, benefits, and more at cash.app/careers.

Job Description

The Financial Crimes Technology team at Cash App detects and reports criminal and suspicious activity on Cash App. We work globally with partners in Engineering, Counsel and Product to guarantee we are providing a safe user experience for our customers while minimizing or eliminating bad activity on our platform.

We are leveraging Machine Learning as an integral part of our toolkit to fulfill our mission. As Cash App scales, we are monitoring hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions across traditional payment and blockchain networks. We uncover and put an end to money laundering, fraud, and illegal activities before they impact our users. Additionally, we improve workflow and case tools, adding features that empower agent productivity and automate the high volume of monitoring.

This is an IC role, but with significant leadership responsibilities that include owning, and driving strategic roadmaps & priorities to completion by collaborating with cross functional stakeholders.

 You will:

• Facilitate CashApp’s global expansion by developing ML models to assess onboarding and ongoing risk and satisfying our Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements
• Build classification models to detect unauthorized use of the app across the peer-to-peer, banking, card, equities and bitcoin products
• Work with Machine Learning Engineers to deploy models to the production environment and monitor ongoing performance
• Leverage large connection graphs of payment transactions, device links and contact books using advanced Graph Embeddings & Networks to detect suspicious activity and drive down false positives
• Use Python DS stack, Pytorch, Snowflake, Airflow based tools, and cloud services (both GCP & AWS) to get the job done

Qualifications

• 6+ years of Machine Learning and Software Engineering experience
• A graduate degree in computer science, data science, operations research, applied math, stats, physics, or a related technical field
• End to end experience of building and deploying ML to production systems that are performant at scale
• Experience of independently owning, influencing and driving programs with multiple cross functional stakeholders (eg. Engineering, Product, and Country leads) that have significant business impact
• Have a curious, growth-oriented mindset and the ability to think in first principles to identify creative solutions that demonstrate value
• Experience with advanced ML techniques like large language models, embeddings, sequence modeling, and graph convolutional networks is a plus

Additional Information

Block takes a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on your location. U.S. locations are categorized into one of four zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future.

Zone A: USD $202,500 - USD $247,500
Zone B: USD $192,400 - USD $235,200
Zone C: USD $182,300 - USD $222,800
Zone D: USD $172,200 - USD $210,400

To find a location’s zone designation, please refer to this resource. If a location of interest is not listed, please speak with a recruiter for additional information. 

Full-time employee benefits include the following:

• Healthcare coverage (Medical, Vision and Dental insurance)
• Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Account
• Retirement Plans including company match 
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Wellness programs, including access to mental health, 1:1 financial planners, and a monthly wellness allowance 
• Paid p