Full-Time Data Scientist

Our mission is to make higher education accessible and affordable for everyone. We empower students with financial support and supercharge their ability to pay down their debt, so they can get on the right financial track, fast.

We build tools that help people feel in control of their financial future, including:

• Private student loans - low rates, people-first service, and flexible payments.
• Student loan refinancing - break free from high-interest rates or monthly payments.
• Scholarships - access to thousands of scholarships to help students pay less.

Earnies are committed to helping students live their best lives, free from the stress of student debt. If you’re as passionate as we are about our mission, read more below, and let’s build something great together! 

What makes an “Earnie” culture: 

• Drivers – Drivers are satisfied by making things happen, not coming along for the ride. They feel a strong sense of ownership for their projects and teams and demand high standards from themselves and others.
• Humility – Humble team players check their egos and consider the team’s needs above their own. They are self-aware of their strengths and opportunities for improvement.
• Growth Mindset – People with a growth mindset approach challenges and failures as learning opportunities. They seek feedback to improve, give feedback to others, and genuinely want to perform well. 

The Data Scientist II position will report to the Manager, Data Scientist. 

As the Data Scientist II, you will:

• Design and implement ETL pipelines to ingest data from operational systems, third-party sources, and public datasets into the data warehouse, transform existing data for user consumption, and source data for model training
• Extract data for model training from various sources, including data warehouses (e.g., Earnest, Navient), production databases, third-party providers, and publicly available dataset
• Prototype machine learning models by applying best practices in feature engineering, model selection, and validation, while writing efficient code using popular frameworks such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, and PyTorch
• Articulate to stakeholders the impact of the models and analyses through presentations and reports. Drafts recommendations for stakeholders that would optimize the product and underwriting policies

Your Impact:

• You will be responsible for guiding product recommendations and model development.You will communicate analyses and results to the Data team backed by data and coupled with actionable conclusions to drive business decisions. This role will be creating new analytical approaches, design efficient data querying and modeling development

About You: 

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics or a related field 
• 3 years of experience developing traditional machine learning models using Python and applying advanced algorithms
• 2+ years of hands-on experience working with data warehouse systems such as Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift to support data-driven model development
• Willingness to travel to the Oakland office monthly to collaborate with other Earnies

Even Better:

• PhD in Machine Learning or very related topic, or Master’s degree with equivalent experience with a minimum of 1-2 years of experience