Data Scientist

Data Scientist

At Interac, we design and deliver products and solutions that give Canadians control over their money so they can get more out of life. But that’s not all. Whether we’re leading real-time money movement, driving innovative commerce solutions like open payments for transit systems, or making advancements in new areas like verification and open banking, we are playing a key role in shaping the future of the digital economy in Canada.

Want to make a lasting impact amongst a community of creative thinkers, problem solvers, technical gurus and high-performance application developers? We want to hear from you.

The Data Scientist will be responsible for providing actionable insights for the fraud management practice. The main objective for this role will be to work with various fraud teams and other internal business partners, developing data science products (models, features, insights) to aid in fraud mitigation.

In this role, the Data Scientist will focus on fraud research and model development for new Interac products coming to market. Working on a team, developing novel features, and implementing fraud detection solutions, as well as participating in product strategy discussions will be expected. Additionally, in order to build effectively for these new product launches, this role will involve cross collaboration between subject matter experts in the fraud space, the business, and the technical product design teams.

The Data Scientist will work with a variety of people to provide deliverables that include research insights, product design input, and data science assets (models, tables, visualizations, etc) that add value to the business. These assets will ultimately be used to ensure that Interac products are trusted, giving our both our business partners, and our end-user customers themselves, confidence that they can use any new Interac products safely. It is crucial that these deliverables provide solutions that are reproducible, well-documented, peer-reviewed, and version controlled.

Using a full-cycle data science approach, the Data Scientist will need to understand problems and surrounding context between fraud and the business need, formulate a hypothesis on how to solve these problems, and execute, providing status updates as needed.  The resulting deliverables may be used directly by end-users in the team or result in requirements for features to incorporate into one of Interac’s production environments.

You'll be responsible for:

• Collaborating with fraud product owners and software developers to enable deployment of fraud solutions that will scale across the company’s ecosystem.

• Working with large complex data sets to solve difficult, non-routine analysis problems applying advanced analytical methods as needed.

• Conducting end-to-end analysis that includes data gathering and requirements specification, processing, analysis, ongoing deliverables, and presentations.

• Collaborating with business customers and fraud product owners to understand needs, recommend strategy enhancements, and deploy predictive analytics across multiple platforms.

• Researching, developing, deploying and analyzing testing strategies to continuously improve current fraud related deliverables.

• Preparing detailed documentation to transfer knowledge and satisfy governance and regulatory concerns.

• Communicating technical fraud solutions to non-technical audiences.

• Consulting on applying quantitative problem solving to business problems using analytics in both mentoring and classroom settings.

You bring:

• A degree in Business, Mathematics, Science, Statistics or equivalent combination of education and industry experience.

• 3 or more years of experience in the financial industry.

• 3 years or more of experience in data analytics.

• 2 years or more of experience using machine learning.

• Strong knowledge and skills in mathematics.

• A strong sense of planning, priority setting, problem resolution and decision making.

• Knowledge of Interac products.

• Expert knowledge of data mining, databases, SQL and machine learning.

• Experience with the following technologies/databases: Oracle, HDFS, Redshift, Spark (PySpark), Python.

• Strong knowledge of the Canadian payment industry, payments transaction data and process flows.

• Knowledge of IT processes and infrastructure required to support analytics.

• Significant experience working with implementing concepts, such as predictive modeling, profiling, feature development, behavioral analysis, clustering, and data mining.

• Excellent inter-personal skills, communication, problem solving, conflict management, client-focused, customer-driven and able to work under pressure.

• Familiarity with Cloudera, Jupyter, Github, AWS is an asset.

Interac requires employees to complete a background check that is completed by one of our service providers.  We use this service to complete the following checks:

• Canadian criminal record check;
• Public safety verification;
• Canadian ID cross-check;
• 5-year employment verification;
• Education verification; and
• If applicable, Credit Inquiry and Social Media Check

How we work
We know that exceptional people have great ideas and are passionate about their work.  Our culture encourages excellence and actively rewards contributions with:

Connection: You’re surrounded by talented people every day who are driven by their passion of a common goal.

Core Values:  They define us. Living them helps us be the best at what we do.

Compensation & Benefits: Pay is driven by individual and corporate performance and we provide a multitude of benefits and perks.

Education: To ensure you are the best at what you do we invest in you