Senior Applied AI Research Scientist

About this role

Develop and productionize foundation models using behavioral and other sequential data to improve fraud detection. The role spans applied research, model evaluation, deployment, and customer-facing collaboration in a regulated financial technology environment.

About the company

Sardine is a financial crime platform that helps companies detect fraud, money laundering, and other risk with real-time behavioral and device intelligence.

The team

Data Science

What you'll do

• Scope research opportunities, design experiments, and drive the foundation-model roadmap.
• Build rigorous evaluation benchmarks, including time- and entity-aware holdouts, calibration, and drift monitoring.
• Take models from data preparation and pretraining through fine-tuning, optimization, and real-time deployment.
• Partner with Engineering on training infrastructure, GPU efficiency, feature and embedding stores, and production serving.
• Work with customers and client-facing teams to translate model capabilities into actionable risk decisions.
• Collaborate with Legal and Compliance on explainability, documentation, and model governance.

What we're looking for

• 4+ years in applied machine learning, quantitative modeling, or ML engineering.
• Have pretrained or substantially adapted at least one foundation model and deployed it to real traffic.
• Hands-on self-supervised pretraining and practical fine-tuning or adaptation experience.
• Production experience with model serving, versioning, monitoring, and rollback.
• Strong Python and SQL skills, and experience preparing very large datasets.
• Ability to independently lead ambiguous research projects and communicate across teams.

Nice to have

• Experience in fraud, AML, payments, credit, or adversarial machine learning.
• Experience building and evaluating production LLM-based agents.
• Publications, released models, or open-source contributions in representation learning or sequence modeling.
• Model risk management and documentation experience in regulated finance.

Benefits

• Cash and equity compensation, with early exercise for all options, including pre-vested options.
• Flexible paid time off and a year-end break.
• Health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents.
• 4% 401(k) or RRSP matching.
• MacBook Pro and a home-office setup stipend.
• Monthly meal and social meet-up stipends.
• Annual health and wellness and learning stipends.