Senior Applied AI Research Scientist

As a Senior Applied AI Research Scientist at Sardine, you will drive the next generation of foundation models for fraud detection. Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime, trusted by companies including FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit, Edward Jones, ZoomInfo, and Checkout.com. You will combine deep learning and foundation model expertise with rich behavioral datasets spanning device intelligence, behavior biometrics, session telemetry, payment events, and consortium signals to build practical, state-of-the-art fraud detection solutions.

What you'll do

• Identify and scope opportunities, design rigorous experiments, and execute on the roadmap for foundation model research and development.
• Own the evaluation bar for foundation model performance: offline benchmarks, time- and entity-aware holdouts, calibration, drift and degradation monitoring, and honest head-to-head comparisons against strong classical baselines.
• Take models the full distance from data prep and tokenization through pretraining, fine-tuning, distillation, quantization, and deployment behind a real-time inference path with tight latency budgets.
• Partner with Engineering on training infrastructure, GPU efficiency, feature and embedding stores, and serving at production scale.
• Work directly with client-facing teams and customers to turn model capabilities and limits into decisions their risk teams can act on.
• Partner with Legal, Compliance, and customer model risk teams to build the explainability, documentation, and governance your bank and fintech customers need to satisfy their own regulators.

What you bring

• 4+ years in applied machine learning, quantitative modeling, or ML engineering, including at least one foundation model you pretrained or substantially adapted and put in front of real traffic.
• Hands-on self-supervised pretraining experience, plus practical fine-tuning and adaptation.
• Production experience with model serving, versioning, monitoring, and rollback.
• Ability to self-manage and drive ambiguous applied research projects with clear communication across data science, engineering, product, marketing, and external partners.
• Strong Python, strong SQL, and comfort preparing very large datasets.

Nice to have

• Background in fraud, AML, payments, credit, or adversarial machine learning.
• Experience building and evaluating LLM-based agents in production.
• Publications, released models, or open source contributions in representation learning or sequence modeling.
• Experience with model risk management and documentation in a regulated financial environment.

What we offer

• Generous compensation in cash and equity, with early exercise for all options including pre-vested.
• Remote-first work from anywhere in the United States or Canada.
• Flexible paid time off and year-end break.
• Health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents (US and Canada).
• 4% matching in 401k or RRSP (US and Canada).
• MacBook Pro delivered to your door.
• One-time stipend to set up a home office with desk, chair, screen, and other essentials.
• Monthly meal stipend.
• Monthly social meet-up stipend.
• Annual health and wellness stipend.
• Annual learning stipend.

About Sardine

Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime, helping organizations stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations. Sardine's platform is strengthened by one of the fastest-growing fraud consortiums in the market, spanning more than 6 billion profiled devices, 800 million consumers, and 3 million businesses worldwide.