Principal Data Scientist

ABOUT HAPPY MONEY

Happy Money is a consumer finance company that empowers people to achieve their goals through simple, transparent loans funded by trusted financial institutions. Through its proprietary lending platform, Hive, Happy Money delivers a fully digital experience that simplifies borrowing for consumers and helps credit unions, banks and asset managers diversify balance sheets and scale with confidence. Happy Money’s end-to-end loan origination and participation programs provide partners with turnkey access to high-performing assets, underpinned by disciplined credit expertise and robust risk management. Together with its lending partners, Happy Money has originated more than $6.5 billion in loans to help nearly 350,000 people take greater control of their financial futures. Learn more at happymoney.com. View our Employee Privacy Policy here.

We are looking for an innovative and driven Principal Data Scientist to join our team at Happy Money. In this role, you'll serve as a technical leader building production-grade machine learning solutions across the Happy Money ecosystem. Your work will span underwriting, marketing funnel optimization, and servicing—leveraging financial and behavioral data to drive business impact. You'll lead innovation, elevate our data science capabilities, and expand DS impact to new areas of the company. Join us at an exciting inflection point where your technical depth and leadership will shape how Happy Money scales responsibly while reducing financial stress for our members.

• Design, build, and deploy production machine learning models and pipelines end-to-end, partnering closely with Product and Engineering teams to ensure robust, scalable implementations
• Lead technical innovation across the data science organization by improving existing DS processes, championing best practices, and bringing data science solutions to new business areas
• Develop financial models using alternative data sources to identify creditworthiness and expand access to financial support for underserved populations
• Build behavioral models to uncover patterns that drive positive financial outcomes, increase member engagement, and enhance product utility
• Perform rigorous model calibration, validation, and monitoring to ensure models drive reliable business decisions at scale
• Create clear visualizations and dashboards to communicate complex quantitative analyses to business stakeholders and drive strategic decisions
• Serve as a technical mentor, sharing knowledge across the team and elevating data science capabilities organization-wide

• 10+ years of business experience building and deploying machine learning models that solve marketing, risk, or product problems, with demonstrated success driving business impact
• Advanced formal training in a quantitative field: MS or PhD in Statistics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, or related discipline with rigorous quantitative foundations
• 5+ years of experience designing and analyzing A/B tests and experiments with statistical rigor
• Expert knowledge of Python or R and SQL for data manipulation, statistical analysis, and machine learning at scale
• 7+ years building and deploying supervised and unsupervised machine learning models in production environments
• Experience with AWS technical stack and deploying models via API (Lambda, SageMaker) or containerized solutions (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience with distributed computing frameworks (Spark, Hive, Hadoop, EMR, or similar)
• Strong knowledge of statistics, machine learning (logistic regression, ensemble methods, deep learning, optimization), and model calibration techniques
• Proven ability to drive projects from ideation through production deployment with minimal guidance
• Ability to communicate complex quantitative analyses in a clear, precise, and actionable manner to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Generous medical, dental, and vision insurance options
• Eligible for Annual Bonus
• 401k Plan with a matching contribution
• Generous PTO including sick leave, vacation, volunteer, and more
• 12 Weeks Paid Parental Leave
• Company-paid short & long term disability and life insurance
• Monthly tech stipend to help cover expenses for remote work
• Happy Money is a 100% fully distributed workforce