Principal Research Scientist [Risk]

About the role

Plata is a fintech focusing on risk decisioning and scalable credit products. This role owns the foundation model program end to end, from research direction to production deployment and impact on risk metrics like cost of risk, approval rates, and portfolio NPV.

What you'll do

• Develop and oversee end-to-end foundation models for financial event sequences and fine-tuning for downstream tasks
• Drive methodology, implementation, performance, latency, robustness, interpretability, and regulatory compliance
• Take models from research to production including training infrastructure, evaluation, serving, and monitoring
• Research state-of-the-art methods, publish work, and present at conferences
• Mentor engineers and scientists, establishing technical standards across the team
• Communicate results clearly to product, risk, business, and leadership teams

What they're looking for

• Experience applying deep learning to sequential data, transformer architectures preferred
• Strong foundation in statistics and probability
• Knowledge of machine learning algorithms including GBM, MLP, CNN, RNN, Transformers
• Experience taking large models to production: distributed training, model serving, latency and cost trade-offs
• Ability to balance solution complexity with practical applicability
• Strong mathematical or technical education from a top technical university

For applicants in Nigeria

• The listing states eligibility worldwide, so Nigeria is eligible to apply
• Timezone expectations are not specified in the listing; confirm during interview
• Relocation is mentioned for certain hubs; remote work is allowed but check specifics during interview