Data Science Lead
- Compensation
- $144K–$260K / yr
- Location
- Washington, D.C.
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Lead
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Data science
- Posted
Skills
Nice to have
- Work on agentic systems, LLM agents or autonomous transaction flows, whether in compliance, payments, fraud or infrastructure.
- Experience building a large dataset or collection from nothing, including the unglamorous parts: schema decisions, quality checks, and maintenance.
- Blockchain or on chain data experience: clustering, attribution, heuristics, anomaly detection, mempool analysis, or research into privacy preserving systems.
- Experience in payments, fraud or risk data science, where the cost of a false negative is commercial rather than academic.
- Having grown a team from a few people to a full department, and being able to describe what broke on the way.
- A PhD or equivalent research training, or a record of published applied research.
- Experience in a regulated environment or with model risk management frameworks, whether in financial services, or as a vendor to it, or in another domain with equivalent assurance requirements.
Full description
Elliptic is the leader in digital asset decisioning, we have built the most comprehensive platform for efficiently extracting crypto data and intelligence across blockchains with the greatest accuracy.
Our platform’s unrivalled uptime, scalability, depth and breadth of our data and intelligence means exacting organizations choose Elliptic for their compliance, risk management, intelligence operations and blockchain infrastructure needs.
Founded in 2013, Elliptic is headquartered in London with offices in New York, Washington D.C., UAE, Singapore and Tokyo. To learn more, visit and follow us on LinkedIn and X.
Do you want to lead a data science team on a problem the industry has not solved yet, while still writing code yourself? Are you excited about building the data foundation for how compliance works when the customer is an autonomous agent rather than a person? Are you looking for a values led company where a small team is trusted with a question that matters commercially in months, not years?The impact you will have:
You will lead data science inside Elliptic's Intelligence team, alongside Intelligence Collection, Research and Investigations, and Professional Services. This is deliberately a player-coach role with a prospect of scaling a team. At first you will lead a small team of data scientists and you are expected to own the team's direction, performance and growth. You will own the evidence for the models your team builds, and you will represent them at Elliptic's model risk governance forum. This is not a compliance tax bolted onto the technical work: it is the reason institutions trust our outputs.
The reason we are hiring a lead as we add more data scientists is that a small team working on an unsolved problem needs someone who intrinsically understands the domain, not a layer of management above it. You will set what this team works on, hire the next people into it, and be the person whose technical judgement the team trusts because you can do the work yourself.
What you will do:
- Lead and grow the team. Set objectives with your data scientists in the context of company strategy, own their performance and development, and be the manager who has the difficult conversation rather than deferring it. Level the team against Elliptic's Intelligence career framework and build real development paths.
- Hire the next data scientists. Own the hiring process end to end with support: levels, job descriptions, hiring plan, interview panel and bar, and the hiring decision. Team growth to seven to nine people over time depends on you getting this right early.
- Build the collection for the future of compliance. Take it from a directive to a specification to delivered data: define what good looks like, sequence the work, set the quality bar, and be honest about what the dataset does and does not support.