Staff Data Scientist - Risk

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 discoverabi