Data Scientist (Mid - Senior)

What is Spade?

Financial institutions process billions of transactions every day across cards, ACH, wires, and third party aggregators. But most of that data is difficult to use. Descriptions are inconsistent, merchant names don’t match, and categories vary by payment type.

Spade is a data and AI platform that turns messy transaction strings into structured, verified records — and gives teams the tools to act on it across authorization, attribution, analytics, and AI initiatives. Spade leads the market in terms of merchant coverage, matching accuracy, geolocation data, and speed of transaction enrichment. Customers such as, FIS, Bilt, Mercury, Stripe, alongside many other leaders in fintech and financial services, trust Spade's data to enable personalized rewards programs, accurate applied spending rules, precise analytics requests, and innovative AI-powered features.

Spade is a fast growing, Series B company backed by industry experts and top tier investors (including Oak HC/FT, a16z, Flourish Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Gradient Ventures). We’re a lean and execution-oriented hybrid team, passionate about building exceptional products for our growing customer base. We care deeply about diversity of background, experience, and opinion. We value empathy, curiosity, and passion, and strive to create an environment where individuals have autonomy and the ability to take ownership over their work.

What will you be doing?

At Spade, data isn't just what we work with—it's our product. As a Senior Data Scientist, you’ll be delivering real-time insights that transform how financial institutions understand and act on transactions. Using our proprietary merchant, location, and transaction datasets, you'll build across the full ML spectrum—from traditional ML and NLP to AI agents—and work directly with engineering and product to turn ideas into scalable solutions.  

You will:

• Own ML/AI products end-to-end—from problem framing and prototyping to deployment, monitoring, and iteration
• Develop and productionize ML/AI models for entity resolution, data enrichment, and quality improvements
• Design and maintain end-to-end data workflows, pipelines, and testing frameworks for production systems
• Collaborate with engineering, analytics, and product teams to to translate ambiguous problems into shipped features
• Use customer insights and internal metrics to identify new opportunities within Spade’s transaction data
• Partner with leadership to define data science strategy, roadmaps, and best practices

What experience, skills, and qualifications are necessary? 

• Must have: 
• 5+ years of industry experience in data science or machine learning
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field
• Deep expertise in machine learning, statistical modeling, deep learning, and entity resolution
• Fluency in Python (including ML/statistical libraries) and SQL
• Experience in high-growth startup environment 
• Nice to have: 
• Experience in fintech, particularly with payments or transaction-level data
• A Master’s or Ph.D. in data science, machine learning, statistics, or another quantitative field
• Experience with PySpark and Databricks

Why join Spade? 

• Be a cultural founder. As an early employee, you’ll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture. 
• Get in on the ground floor. We’re a small but well-funded team – joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside. 
• Build the next generation of financial infrastructure. Our products will power the next wave of innovation in fintech, helping our customers deliver better, more transparent products and services to the consumer. 

Benefits include:

• Competitive compensation and equity package
• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits for US-based employees
• Short-term disability insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Early exercise program and extended post-termination exercise period
• 401K for retirement planning
• Hybrid team, with pet-friendly headquarters in NYC
• Paid parental leave
• $750 work-from-home setup stipend and $125 monthly lunch stipend

Diversity & Inclusion at Spade:

Spade is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culture that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We believe that having people with different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives not only helps us build the best products for our customers, but also helps us be the best version of ourselves.

Salary Range:

• At Spade, we view total compensation as consisting of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they bring to our team. 
• We aim to pay fairly and competitively, and consider a number of factors in developing compensation offers. These factors include years and breadth of experience, interview performance, market dynamics, and internal equity. 
• The anticipated cash salary range for this role is $180,000-$220,000, and an equity grant will also be provided.