Staff Data Scientist, Grant
Staff Data Scientist embedded with Kikoff's Grant business (earned wage access): leading data work for a product area, defining metrics and measurement systems, running experiments including quasi-experimental designs, and building/evaluating decision-driving models in SQL and Python. Also sets data science best practices company-wide, including shaping how AI agents fit the analysis workflow.
- Compensation
- $265K–$306K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Data science
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Experience partnering with product, engineering, and marketing peers across strategy, goal setting, approach, and execution
- Track record of defining metrics from scratch and getting a team to run on them
- Designed and run experimentation programs, including without clean randomization; comfortable with quasi-experimental and causal inference methods
- Hands-on with production-quality SQL and Python; builds pipelines, analyses, and models
- Experience building or working closely with models that drive product decisions (ranking, fraud, forecasting, personalization, underwriting, detection)
- AI tools are a core part of daily analytical work; can show how they changed speed and quality of output
- Drives decisions with data in front of executive audiences, including when data doesn't support the plan
Nice to have
- Consumer fintech experience, especially products expanding access for un- and under-banked customers
- Built an experimentation or causal inference practice in an org that didn't have one
- Taken a model from proof of concept to production, or shipped test/challenger models that changed a product decision
- Prior staff or tech-lead scope: set direction for other ICs and owned a domain's data strategy
- 8+ years in data science or analytics
Full description
Kikoff: The Fintech Powering Financial Security at Scale
Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company on a mission to empower everyone to achieve financial security. With record revenue growth in 2025 and a unicorn valuation, we've built a suite of products that help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money.
We're scaling fast. Join us if you want to build something meaningful and help millions of people move forward financially.
Why Kikoff:
This is a consumer fintech startup, and you will be working with serial entrepreneurs who have built strong consumer brands and innovative products. We value extreme ownership, clear communication, a strong sense of craftsmanship, and the desire to create lasting work and work relationships. Yes, you can build an exciting business AND have real-life real-customer impact.
About Grant
Grant is Kikoff's fastest growing business line. It started with earned wage access, solving the most common and most painful problem in consumer finance: short-term liquidity. Gas to get to work, an unexpected bill, groceries before the next paycheck. We give people fast, fair access to earned wages without the fees the industry has normalized, and we do it with a profitable business model.
Since launching to the public at the start of 2025, Grant has grown from thousands to 900k+ active subscribers and has disbursed and recollected over $325M in cash advances. EWA is the core, and several new products are underway on top of it.
Grant runs as its own business inside Kikoff, with a business lead and dedicated product, engineering, design, and marketing leads.
About the Grant data science team
Our job is to make sure every Grant product does three things: makes a clear and compelling promise to the customer, delivers on that promise reliably over time, and turns that durable value into a business healthy enough to fund the next product, in a way customers would agree is fair. Every metric we define, experiment we run, and model we build should trace back to one of those three.
We're a team of three data scientists within Kikoff's Data organization, embedded full time with Grant. Each of us leads the data work for a product area and all of us take part in Grant-level roadmap and objective setting with Grant's business lead and the product, engineering, design, and marketing leads.
About the role
You'd be the fourth Data Scientist focused on the Grant business, and part of a larger Kikoff wide Data team. You'll take on a product area within Grant as its data lead, working day to day with the leads for that area, and you'll bring a staff-level view to the Grant-wide conversations on where the business goes next.
Two things we're asking of this hire beyond the product area. First, help set technical direction and best practices for data science across Kikoff, not just Grant. Second, help define how we work as AI agents become a core part of the analysis loop, from exploration to pipelines to experiment readouts. We're actively rebuilding our workflow around this and want someone who has opinions.