Staff Data Scientist - Risk at Shakepay in Canada

At Shakepay, we’re on a mission to usher in the Bitcoin golden age. We’re reimagining financial services to give every Canadian their fair shake. Our culture is built around doing work that matters, winning as a team, and celebrating success. If you're the kind of person who values growth, shipping fast, and sharing your ideas openly with a group of like-minded people, come and build with us! About Shakepay Since 2015, we’ve been building the Shakepay app to make buying and earning bitcoin fast, easy, and secure. In 2022, we launched the Shakepay Card, allowing shakers to earn bitcoin rewards when they shop. Today, more than one million Canadians use Shakepay to grow their bitcoin savings and take control of their financial future. We’re regulated across all Canadian provinces and territories, and backed by renowned venture capitalists with a funding of $44M. We have a passionate, loyal, and growing community, and we’re looking for people who want to help us build something truly special. About the risk team We’re reinstating a dedicated Risk team at Shakepay to build the next generation of our risk systems and decisioning capabilities. The team’s mission is to enable sustainable business growth by protecting customers, Shakepay, and the broader financial ecosystem from abuse, while balancing fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, customer experience, and operational efficiency. This is a small, newly formed team with significant ownership and ambiguity. The team works closely across fraud, decision science, security, compliance, customer support, and product to build foundational risk systems, data infrastructure, and decision frameworks. This role is not limited to analytics in an already mature environment. You’ll help architect the next generation of Shakepay’s risk systems, including decisioning infrastructure, data instrumentation, case management workflows, and operational tooling. Senior Data Scientist - Risk We’re looking for a Staff Data Scientist to help define how Shakepay measures, understands, and manages risk. This role is analytics-first, with selective use of machine learning where it meaningfully improves understanding or decision quality. You’ll work closely with Risk Engineering and business partners to surface insights, guide prioritization, and evaluate the impact of risk controls. We are open to hiring at either the Senior or Staff level, depending on the candidate’s depth of experience, scope of impact, and ability to lead through ambiguity. What you’ll be doing Partner with engineering to define the architecture and technical strategy for internal risk systems and tooling. Partner with Risk, Engineering, Security, Compliance, Product, and Operations to define risk metrics, success criteria, and decision frameworks. Analyze fraud, scam, and abuse patterns across crypto and fiat products. Build and maintain reporting that tracks fraud loss, false positives, customer friction, operational efficiency, and control performance. Help design and architect the data, instrumentation, and decisioning systems that power risk operations and fraud prevention workflows. Evaluate and iterate on risk rules and controls using rigorous analysis. Apply statistical methods and selective ML techniques where they materially improve decision quality, operational efficiency, or signal detection. Conduct deep-dive investigations into incidents, trends, and emerging threats. Communicate insights clearly and persuasively to senior stakeholders Help establish data standards, analytical methods, and decision-making practices within the Risk team What success looks like in the first 3-6 months Establish a clear baseline for the core risk metrics we use to understand fraud loss, scam exposure, false positives, customer friction, and operational efficiency. Define the measurement approach for key risk controls, including how we evaluate impact, tradeoffs, and unintended consequences. Improve the quality, consistency, and discoverability of the data needed to analyze risk decisions and customer outcomes. Deliver high-leverage investigations that identify concrete opportunities to reduce risk or improve customer experience. Create a repeatable rhythm for turning risk analysis into prioritization, product decisions, operational changes, and engineering work. How scope changes by level Senior candidates should be ready to own complex risk analyses end to end, partner closely with engineering and business teams, improve the data foundations required for risk decisioning, and influence decisions through clear analytical judgment. Staff candidates should be ready to take on a broader leadership role within the risk function. This includes setting analytical direction, shaping risk systems and decisioning frameworks, creating shared language and metrics across ambiguous problem spaces, aligning cross-functional teams around common objectives, raising the quality of decision-making, and helping shape the long-term risk roadmap. Who we’re looking for 8+ years of experience as a Data Scientist, Decision Science or in a similar analytical role Experience with fraud, risk, trust and safety, AML, or compliance analytics. Strong proficiency in SQL and Python. Experience performing deep analytical work and ML techniques related to regression, classification, experiment design, causal inference, or decision analysis. Strong product and business judgment, with the ability to connect analytical work to customer outcomes, risk outcomes, and company priorities. Experience working with modern cloud data warehouses and tooling (i.e Snowflake, dbt, etc). Outstanding communication skills and the ability to translate complex analysis into clear business recommendations. Proven ability to work in ambiguous, fast-moving environments. Strong sense of ownership and ability to challenge assumptions constructively. Experience partnering closely with cross-functional stakeholders to influence decisions. Good judgment when tailoring the analytical toolkit to the problem at hand. Interest in Bitcoin and familiarity with fintech, payments, crypto, or other regulated industries. Why join us? Help shape the future of money: Be part of a team that's revolutionizing financial services in Canada, one sat at a time. Impact millions: As cryptocurrency continues to gain traction, our potential for growth is massive. You can help us bring Shakepay and Bitcoin to all Canadians. Grow your career: We’re growing, and so can you! We have programs in place to encourage continuous learning, growth, and development. Ideas, not titles: We want the best ideas to make their way through, no matter where they come from. Perks and benefits 🤝 Be an owner - Every employee has stock options as part of their total compensation 🥅 Reach your goals - Yearly salary assessments 🦷 Health & wellness :  Access to comprehensive health and dental coverage, including health and wellness spending accounts. 🌎 Remote-friendly: Work from anywhere in Canada, with optional access to our office spaces in Montreal and Toronto. 🆙 Level Up: A $2,000 annual budget for courses, certifications, and training to support your career growth. 🌴 Time off: 20 days of vacation per year. And if you use all your vacation, we give you a $1,000 bonus. 🐣 Parental leave: Enjoy a parental leave top up to 100% of your salary for 18 weeks. 🙌 Have fun together: quarterly team-specific or company-wide offsite to connect with each other The base salary range for this position is $150,000 - $180,000 CAD. Base pay may vary based on factors such as years of experience, skills and qualifications. Additionally, employees are eligible for equity,  pay increases based on performance, benefits including health and dental care, and paid time off. We understand that potential can be just as valuable as experience. If you're eager to learn, grow, and contribute to the mission but worry that you may not have the “right” experience, we still want you to apply. We encourage applications from everyone, regardless of background and life experience. We’re firm believers that a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept. Fluency in English is required due to the percentage of English-speaking customers and the nature of our platform, which is available to all Canadians. We use technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), to support certain parts of our hiring process. This can include tools that assist with scheduling, application review, candidate communications, and generating interview notes, guides, or summaries so our team can stay focused on the conversation. All hiring decisions are made by our hiring team.