Sr Data Scientist – Financial Crimes Detection, PayPal World

About PayPal

The Company PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. We operate a global, two‑sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person.

PayPal is more than a connection to third‑party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers. We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds.

We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored‑value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards. Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other.

We offer merchants an end‑to‑end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross‑border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross‑border trade.

Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day. We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities.

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Role Overview

Job Summary: As a Data Scientist, you will apply your strategic and analytical skills to build monitoring solutions to combat money laundering. This job will lead development and implementation of advanced data science models and algorithms. You will work with stakeholders to understand requirements, analyze and derive insights from large volumes of data, implement monitoring solutions in a fast‑paced environment while driving best practices in data science, ensuring data quality.

Additional Context – PayPal World: PayPal World is a new global interoperable platform ecosystem connecting major digital and payment systems — including PayPal, Venmo, Mercado Pago, NPCI (UPI), Weixin Pay, etc. — into a single network, enabling cross‑border P2P transfers and commerce payments for users. As Sr Data Scientist on this platform's financial crimes detection program, you will design, build, and deploy monitoring solutions to combat money laundering and fraud detection capabilities from the ground up. This is a foundational role. PayPal World introduces transaction patterns that don’t exist in our core platform — cross‑wallet P2P flows between independent payment ecosystems, multi‑jurisdictional money movement with limited counterparty visibility, and new risk typologies emerging from network interoperability.

You will work at the intersection of data engineering, detection science, and compliance to build the models, rules, and monitoring frameworks that keep this platform safe. You’ll operate with significant autonomy in an ambiguous, fast‑moving environment. The data pipelines are being built alongside you. The regulatory framework is evolving. Your partners span product engineering, compliance policy, risk platform, and external wallet operators. You’ll need to be comfortable making decisions with incomplete information, prototyping quickly, and iterating as the platform scales.

This role sits within PayPal’s Global Financial Crimes and Customer Protection (GFCCP) team reporting into the Financial Crime Intelligence Center (FCIC) team. You’ll have direct visibility to senior leadership and the opportunity to define the detection architecture for a platform that is central to PayPal’s growth strategy.

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Essential Responsibilities

• Lead the development and implementation of advanced data science models.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to understand requirements.
• Drive best practices in data science.
• Ensure data quality and integrity in all processes.
• Mentor and guide junior data scientists.
• Stay updated with the latest trends in data science.

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Minimum Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of relevant work experience and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.

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Additional Responsibilities

• Design and implement transaction monitoring rules and machine learning models to detect money laundering, structuring & fraud, across PayPal World’s multi‑wallet payment rails.
• Develop and maintain feature engineering pipelines in BigQuery, creating reusable primitives (velocity, growth ratios, concentration, dormancy signals) that serve multiple detection use cases.
• Partner with data engineering teams to define data requirements for new transaction types flowing through the network platform, ensuring detection‑relevant fields are captured from the start.
• Analyze transaction patterns across jurisdictions to identify emerging typologies unique to interoperable payment networks (e.g., cross‑wallet layering, dormant account exploitation via external funding, regulatory arbitrage across connected ecosystems).
• Build model validation frameworks including back‑testing against historical cross‑platform activity and false positive analysis to ensure detections are operationally sustainable.
• Translate detection outputs into actionable intelligence for compliance investigators, designing alert packages that provide sufficient context for efficient case resolution.
• Collaborate with compliance policy teams across multiple jurisdictions (FinCEN, AUSTRAC, CSSF, and others) to ensure detections satisfy local regulatory obligations as the platform expands.
• Produce clear documentation of detection methodology, threshold rationale, and model performance for regulatory examination and internal model governance review.
• Advise product and engineering teams on financial crime risk implications of new PayPal World features, payment flows, and partner integrations before they launch.

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Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building AML/fraud detection models or transaction monitoring systems at a financial institution, fintech, or payment network.
• Strong SQL skills with experience writing complex analytical queries against large‑scale transactional datasets (BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar cloud data warehouses).
• Python proficiency for data analysis, feature engineering, and model development (pandas, scikit‑learn, or equivalent).
• Experience with BigQuery ML, TensorFlow, XGBoost, or similar frameworks for classification and anomaly detection.
• Understanding of AML regulatory frameworks (BSA/FinCEN, AUSTRAC, EU AMLD, FATF guidelines) and how detection systems map to regulatory obligations.
• Experience working with payment network data — understanding of P2P flows, funding instruments, settlement processes, and the distinction between sender‑side and receiver‑side risk signals.
• Comfort operating in ambiguity: ability to define your own workstreams, make progress with incomplete data, and adapt as platform architecture evolves.
• Experience partnering with compliance investigators to understand how detections translate to actionable cases — you’ve seen the downstream impact of your models and tuned accordingly.
• Familiarity with graph‑based analysis or network detection methods for identifying linked accounts, collusion, or money‑movement networks.
• Strong communication skills — ability to explain model behavior to non‑technical compliance stakeholders and defend methodology in regulatory contexts.

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Nice to Have

• Experience building detection systems for a multi‑party payment network (Zelle, RTP, SWIFT, card networks) where counterparty visibility is limited.
• Exposure to cross‑border compliance challenges: multi‑jurisdictional filing requirements, sanctions screening across networks, or CDD/EDD processes for foreign PEPs.
• Experience with Airflow or similar orchestration tools for scheduling batch detection pipelines.
• Background in feature store design or reusable detection primitive architectures.
• Prior experience in a “zero‑to‑one” build — standing up a detection function for a new product or platform from scratch.

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Compensation

• Primary Location – Scottsdale, Arizona: $123,500.00 – $183,700.00 annually
• Additional Location – Omaha, Nebraska: $123,500.00 – $183,700.00 annually

Additional compensation may include an annual performance bonus, equity, or other incentive compensation, as applicable.

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Benefits

At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy. We offer comprehensive, choice‑based programs to support personal wellbeing—physical, emotional, and financial—delivering meaningful value where it matters most. Our benefits include:

• Generous paid time off
• Healthcare coverage for you and your family
• Resources to create financial security
• Support for mental health
• Flexible, balanced hybrid work model (3 days in the office, 2 days remote or office‑based)

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Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

PayPal provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

We will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities. If you are unable to submit an application because of incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at paypalglobaltalentacquisition@paypal.com.

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Belonging at PayPal

Our employees are central to advancing our mission, and we strive to create an environment where everyone can do their best work with a sense of purpose and belonging. Belonging at PayPal means creating a workplace with a sense of acceptance and security where all employees feel included and valued.

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Application Information

• PayPal does not charge candidates any fees for courses, applications, resume reviews, interviews, background checks, or onboarding.
• We will never ask you to share passwords, one‑time passcodes (OTP), or verification codes. Any such request is a red flag and likely part of a scam.
• All communication regarding your application will come from official PayPal email domains.
• To report suspected fraudulent activity, visit: https://careers.pypl.com/contact-us

Account Creation Guidelines

• Provide full legal First Name/Family Name (capitalize first letters, avoid all‑caps).
• Use the same format as your government ID for hyphenated or multi‑capitalized names.

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