Research Scientist II (Fraud)

What you’ll do

As a Research Scientist II on the Fraud Research team, you will help improve how Pindrop detects, scores, and investigates fraud and scams across voice and IVR interactions. You will work on applied machine learning problems that directly impact fraud and scam prevention for major enterprise customers, balancing core model development with real-world investigation and analysis. In this role, you will:

• Build and improve fraud risk models and scoring systems using a combination of audio, behavioral, and metadata-based signals.
• Analyze fraud patterns across customer environments and translate findings into measurable improvements in model performance, investigation workflows, or mitigation strategies.
• Research and build a scam detection stack, from conception to realization.
• Partner with engineering and cross-functional teams to move successful research into production and improve fraud outcomes in live environments.
• Support high-priority fraud investigations by analyzing system behavior, fraudster attack patterns, and detection gaps, then recommending practical next steps for our customers.
• Improve the quality and precision of fraud-related identity signals, including voice-based indicators and repeat-offender detection.
• Design and maintain reproducible research workflows, internal tools, and evaluation pipelines that help the team experiment efficiently and measure impact clearly.
• Contribute to technical reviews, knowledge sharing, and research documentation that helps the broader organization understand and apply your work.
• Contribute to adjacent innovation areas, including emerging AI-assisted fraud-analysis workflows, when relevant to team priorities.

Who you are

• You are persistent, curious, and scientifically rigorous, especially when working through ambiguous data, noisy signals, or fast-evolving fraud behavior.
• You are comfortable owning research workstreams from problem definition through experimentation, analysis, and recommendation.
• You communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical partners, and you can explain tradeoffs, assumptions, and results in a practical way.
• You care deeply about reproducibility, documentation, and building research that can stand up in real production settings.
• You are motivated by high-impact security and fraud problems and want your work to influence real customer outcomes.

Your skill-set

Must-Haves:

• Advanced Degree (Master’s or PhD) in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent applied research experience.
• 3+ years of professional experience in machine learning, large-language models, fraud detection, natural language processing, risk modeling, speech or signal processing, anomaly detection.