Lead - POC Data Science at Sardine

Who we are: Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime. Our integrated solution unifies data across risk teams to help organizations stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations. Sardine’s platform is strengthened by one of the fastest-growing fraud consortiums in the market, spanning more than 6 billion profiled devices, 800 million consumers, and 3 million businesses worldwide. Leading companies including FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit, Edward Jones, ZoomInfo, and Checkout.com rely on Sardine to secure and grow trust in their products. Our culture: We have hubs in the Bay Area, NYC, Austin, Toronto, and São Paulo. However, we maintain a remote-first work culture. #WorkFromAnywhere We hire talented, self-motivated individuals with extreme ownership and high growth orientation. We value performance and not hours worked. We believe you shouldn't have to miss your family dinner, your kid's school play, friends get-together, or doctor's appointments for the sake of adhering to an arbitrary work schedule. Location Remote - USA or Canada From Home / Beach / Mountain / Cafe / Anywhere! We are a remote-first company with a globally distributed team. So you can find your productive zone and work from there. About the role We're looking for a Lead - PoC Data Science to lead our stellar Proof of Concept (PoC) data science team. This is a player-coach role where you will drive critical proof-of-concept (PoC) projects for enterprise customers and financial institutions, while developing your team’s craft and accelerating their impact. We’re seeking a hands-on leader with a passion for fraud prevention and the ability to build from scratch while thriving in high-stakes environments. You will work directly with clients to understand their unique fraud challenges, rapidly prototype proof-of-concept models, and help build scalable production ready solutions using fraud analytics and machine learning. You'll own a mix of client-facing POC/POV delivery, DS/ML product development, and team performance, with fraud domain expertise and technical credibility to work directly with clients, and with internal engineering, sales and product teams. What you'll be doing: Lead and develop a team of IC data scientists — set direction, unblock work, run 1:1s, and grow each person's scope and impact Own POC/POV delivery — partner directly with enterprise customers to demonstrate fraud-loss reduction and platform ROI, from first data pull through to stakeholder readout Stay hands-on in the technical work — build or review ML models, conduct in-depth fraud analyses, and ship production-grade solutions alongside your team Define and track performance metrics — design dashboards and reporting frameworks to measure the effectiveness of risk strategies across clients Translate client problems into data solutions — act as a senior point of contact for fraud challenges, turning complex findings into clear recommendations