[Hiring] Data Scientist @World Business Lenders, LLC

Role Description

This role sits within WBL's Data team and focuses on credit, loan performance, collateral, and recovery modeling, helping the business better understand and predict how loans and their underlying real estate collateral behave over their life cycle.

The work involves large, national real estate and lending datasets. This is real data at scale work, often involving millions of records and large, imperfect, real world files.

A growing part of this role is building predictive and forecasting models using historical, realized outcomes to estimate future loan performance, default and payoff behavior, collateral value changes, recovery timing, costs, and expected outcomes. This includes applying machine learning and statistical techniques where appropriate, not just descriptive or backward-looking analysis.

This role will contribute to the development and validation of WBL's internal loan valuation and risk models and comes with a high degree of ownership and autonomy as our data and modeling capabilities expand.

Typical Day-to-Day

• Join the daily BLV alignment meeting to stay current on the project's philosophy, direction, and status.
• Spend most of the day hands-on with data: pulling and cleaning records from large national real estate and lending datasets, cross-checking fields across multiple sources, and investigating data quality issues.
• Direct AI-assisted tools to run deep, multi-step analyses efficiently while validating their output.
• Run back tests of internal valuation and risk models against real, historical outcomes.
• Build or refine predictive/forecasting components and run sensitivity analyses.
• Present and communicate analyses and findings clearly to the team and stakeholders, translating technical results into actionable takeaways.

What You'll Be Doing (Key Responsibilities)

• Analyze and validate internal credit, risk, valuation, and recovery models against real, historical loan and portfolio outcomes.
• Build predictive and forecasting models that estimate future loan performance, default or payoff timing, collateral value changes, recovery outcomes, costs, and timelines.
• Design and run backtests, sensitivity analyses, scenario comparisons, and time-based analyses across large historical datasets.
• Work with large, multi-source lending and real estate datasets to extract, clean, reconcile, and validate data for analysis and modeling.
• Identify the factors most predictive of loan performance, collateral outcomes, and realized recoveries, and build simple tools that let stakeholders explore model results and scenarios.
• Investigate and clearly document data quality issues, edge cases, model limitations, and inconsistencies found in large, real-world datasets.
• Translate analytical and modeling findings into clear, actionable recommendations for underwriting, credit, pricing, portfolio management, and risk management.
• Maintain clean, reproducible, well-documented analytical and modeling work for independent review, validation, or extension by others.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Finance, Economics, or a related field.

Requirements

• 3 to 7 years of experience in data science, applied modeling, or quantitative analytics, ideally involving large, real-world datasets.
• Stable, reliable internet connection.
• Professional and dedicated remote working setup.

Preferred Background / Industry Experience

• Background or strong interest in finance, banking, commercial lending, U.S. real estate, or property valuation.
• Familiarity with commercial or small business lending is a plus.
• Experience with predictive modeling, forecasting, survival/time-to-event analysis, or other time-based estimation problems.
• Experience with credit risk, default, loss, recovery, model validation, or scenario/sensitivity analysis is a plus.
• Experience reconciling and cleaning data from multiple sources or systems.

Key Soft Skills

• Fast learner, intellectually curious, comfortable getting up to speed quickly in unfamiliar domains.
• Detail-oriented without losing sight of the bigger picture.
• Strong data communication skills, able to explain complex analytical and modeling findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior management.
• Comfortable working with real autonomy and ambiguity, and proactive about asking the right questions.
• Rigorous, skeptical mindset, doesn't take a number at face value without checking it independently.

Specific Technical Skills Needed

• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL.
• Experience with statistical modeling, machine learning, forecasting, or related quantitative techniques, including model evaluation and validation.
• Experience working with large datasets, including writing efficient, performance-conscious data processing code.
• Experience building simple, shareable analytical tools or dashboards is a plus.

Benefits

• Compensation in USD.
• Benefits include paid time off (PTO).
• Fully remote work environment.

Ready to Apply?

If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you - submit your CV in English and hit Apply!