What is Spade?

Spade is building the next generation of fintech infrastructure by providing real-time merchant intelligence for the card ecosystem. We leverage a proprietary, ground-truth database to link any card transaction to a real merchant identity – providing granular merchant, category, and geolocation information. Spade leads the market in terms of merchant coverage, geolocation matching accuracy, and speed of transaction enrichment. Customers including Unit, Mercury, and Sardine trust Spade’s data to authorize more transactions, prevent fraud, and build more innovative features.

We’re a fast growing, remote friendly, Series A company backed by industry experts and top tier investors (including a16z, Flourish Ventures, Y Combinator, and more). We’re a small and mighty team, passionate about building exceptional products for our growing customer base. We care deeply about diversity of opinion, background, and experience. We value empathy, curiosity, and passion, and strive to create an environment where individuals have autonomy and the ability to take ownership over their work.

What will you be doing?

Data plays a key role in our product – we derive valuable insights from vast proprietary data sets (with geographic, category, and merchant data covering 99.9% of all merchants in the United States). We are looking for a product-oriented data scientist passionate about using data to solve complex problems for our customers and team members. As a founding member of our data science team at Spade, you will have the opportunity to work on green-field data projects and play a key role in developing our product. You will:

• Ship high-impact and scalable data products that enhances Spade’s customer experience by collaborating closely with technical and non-technical functions and balancing theoretical soundness and practicality
• Build top-tier merchant databases and low-latency APIs, leveraging techniques such as large-scale entity resolution models (including probabilistic models, embeddings, and clustering models)
• Use your understanding of customer needs, internal metrics, and deep knowledge of the broader ML ecosystem to uncover fresh possibilities within our merchant and transaction data sets to bring additional value to our customers and continuously improve on Spade’s product suite
• Create advanced machine learning algorithms using Python, PySpark, Databricks, and cutting-edge technologies to streamline the preprocessing of batch data, enabling the efficient delivery and maintenance of data insights to production users
• Design and deploy end-to-end workflows and testing frameworks, orchestrating data pipelines that seamlessly integrate processed data into production systems

What experience, skills, and qualifications are necessary?

• Must have:
  • 5+ years industry experience
  • A Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field
  • Fintech experience, specifically familiarity with payments-related data (e.g., card, debit, acquirer, and/or merchant data) and / or transaction data (e.g., card authorization and fraud prevention)
  • Deep experience in machine learning, statistical algorithms, deep learning, and techniques related to entity resolution
  • Fluency with Python, statistical / ML packages, and SQL queries
  • Ability to create compelling narratives with data that translate complex technical concepts and findings to non-technical stakeholders, employing data science tools and visualization techniques where relevant
  • Strong problem-solving skills and ability to break down complex product and technical challenges into accurately estimated milestones
• Nice to have:
  • A Master’s or Ph.D. in data science, machine learning, statistics, or another quantitative field
  • Experience with PySpark and DataBricks

Why join Spade?

• Be a cultural founder. As an early employee, you’ll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture.
• Get in on the ground floor. We’re a small but well-funded team that just raised a substantial seed – joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside.
• Build the next generation of financial infrastructure. Our products will power the next wave of innovation in fintech, helping our customers deliver better, more transparent products and services to the consumer.
• Benefits include:
  • Competitive compensation and equity package
  • Full medical, dental, and vision benefits for US-based employees
  • Life & short-term disability insurance
  • Flexible PTO
  • Early exercise program
  • Extended post-termination exercise period
  • 401K for retirement planning
  • Hybrid team, with pet-friendly headquarters in NYC
  • Paid parental leave
  • Work from home stipend

Diversity & Inclusion at Spade:

Spade is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culture that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We believe that having people with different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives not only helps us build the best products for our customers, but also helps us be the best version of ourselves.

As part of our commitment to health and safety, Spade requires employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as permitted under applicable law.

Salary Range:

• At Spade, we view total compensation as consisting of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they bring to our team.
• We aim to pay fairly and competitively, and consider a number of factors in developing compensation offers. These factors include years and breadth of experience, interview performance, market dynamics, and internal equity.
• The anticipated cash salary range for this role is $150,000-$180,000, and an equity grant will also be provided.