Data Scientist Manager

About Us:

Perpay is a certified B Corp and Philadelphia’s most impactful growth-stage startup. We are driven by a mission to significantly improve the financial stability of everyday Americans. For the past decade, we have established strong product-market fit and a profitable, efficient operating model across a suite of products, positioning Perpay as the premier financial partner for consumers with subprime credit.

With over 500,000 customers who have utilized more than $1 billion in spending power, we are at a pivotal moment. We are scaling our operations, building new offerings, and deepening our impact. We are looking for teammates eager to join us on this journey.

Our venture partners include First Round Capital and L Catterton.

Products we’ve built to make an impact:

• Perpay Marketplace: Combines interest-free payments and modern e-commerce to reduce cost of ownership and promote healthy repayment behavior.
• Perpay+: Leverages Marketplace repayment history to help members monitor and build credit with all 3 credit bureaus.
• Perpay Credit Card: Expands access to the flexibility and benefits of a World Mastercard by removing common barriers like high security deposits and low approval odds.

Our team thrives on in-person collaboration, operating from our unique center-city Philadelphia office. This comfortable "home away from home" space offers river views and fosters rapid product development, strong relationships, and career growth. The energy from achieving big wins is palpable here. While we primarily work in the office, we offer sensible flexibility for personal needs, such as sick children or urgent errands, and coordinate official remote weeks around major holidays. If you are passionate about a meaningful mission, collaboration, equity, and generous perks, Perpay is the best place to be in Philadelphia right now.

About the Role:

Our data team is organized across three groups: Data Engineering, Data Science, and Strategic Analytics. Data Science owns the modeling work that drives Perpay's most consequential decisions: credit decisioning, loss forecasting, marketing-mix attribution, product experimentation, and the ML systems that sit in front of our customers in real time. This year, with the credit portfolio scaling and our modeling needs getting heavier, focus areas include owning the data science side of the risk decisioning service redesign, expanding our card-portfolio modeling, deepening our use of LLMs in both internal workflows and customer-facing surfaces, and tightening the feedback loops between our credit-reporting strategy and the data that informs it. Data Science partners directly with Engineering, Risk, Marketing, Merchandising, and Finance, and works hand-in-hand with Data Engineering and Strategic Analytics on shared infrastructure and shared problems.

Our data science culture leans toward end-to-end ownership: the person who designs a model should be the one who scopes it with stakeholders, ships it to production, and stays close to how it performs once it is live. We invest in rigor where rigor matters and resist the urge to over-engineer where it does not. We are comfortable being challenged on our work and comfortable challenging back, because the alternative is shipping models that look right and are not. The stack: Python everywhere, with the standard data science toolset (scikit-learn, pandas, NumPy, matplotlib, statsmodels) and Bayesian tooling (PyMC) on the projects that need it. Models are deployed and orchestrated on AWS using ECS, Airflow, and Terraform, with Redshift as the underlying warehouse. We use modern LLM tooling where it materially improves the work or the throughput of the team. This role is roughly half individual contribution and half management. You should expect to be writing code, building models, and shipping production work alongside the team, not just reviewing it or unblocking others. You should have at least three years directly managing data scientists, on top of substantial IC experience that you have kept current. If you have grown out of wanting to be in the work, this is the wrong role.

What to Expect from the Role:

You will report directly to the Head of Data and lead a Data Science team that spans early-career ICs through senior ICs. The role owns hiring, performance management, and technical strategy for the function, and partners closely with the Head of Data and the leads of Data Engineering and Strategic Analytics on broader org direction.

What you should show up ready to teach anyone on your first day:

• How a healthy data science team culture supports trustworthy modeling, and what tends to break first when that culture is not there.
• Lessons you have learned about managing technical work where the right answer is not always obvious and the failure mode is "looks plausible but is not actually true."
• Design decisions on a modeling system you built or led recently, recently enough that you can defend the code itself and not just the architecture.
• How you have handled disagreement with stakeholders about scope, methodology, or interpretation of results.
• Your favorite modeling pattern, statistical technique, or piece of data science craft. We'll ask.

What you'll learn more about after you're hired:

• How Perpay's payroll-deduction model and credit card portfolio shape the data we model on, and the regulatory environment those models operate in.
• The team's existing modeling work, including card and marketplace loss forecasts, marketing-mix attribution, Perpay+ analysis, and the real-time decisioning models in production today.
• The data science team's roadmap, including the team's role in the risk decisioning service redesign and the modeling work behind our credit-building products.
• Your stakeholders across Risk, Marketing, Commerce, Finance, and Compliance: who they are, what they need from data science, and how to partner with them on solving the right problems.

Within your first week, you'll:

• Get oriented on the team's current work-in-flight and the models currently in production.
• Sit in on the cross-functional meetings that will be part of your regular cadence, with no expectation of contribution yet.
• Get your development environment set up and start poking at the codebase. We expect you to have something running locally by end of week.

Within your first month, you'll:

• Take over 1:1s with the data science team and start forming your own read on where each person is, what they need, and what they should be working on next.
• Read enough of the team's existing modeling work to be able to defend or question it credibly in front of stakeholders.
• Pick up a piece of in-flight modeling work and start contributing to it directly, alongside the management ramp.
• Begin sitting in on hiring debriefs and contributing to the team's hiring pipeline.

Within your first three months, you'll:

• Set the technical direction for the data science team's contribution to a major in-flight initiative, most likely the risk decisioning service redesign.
• Ship a meaningful piece of modeling work yourself, end-to-end. Not a demonstration project, a real contribution to a real problem the team is working on.
• Have a clear opinion on at least one process or workflow change you want to make on the team, and start making it.
• Complete a full performance check-in cycle with each direct report.

Within your first year, you'll:

• Materially expand the team's reach, through some combination of hiring, scope expansion, and depth on existing work.
• Become the trusted technical voice on data science across the broader leadership team.