Forward Deployed Engineer, Trust and Safety
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About the role
We're people that are passionate about making the internet a safer and more trusted place for all. We love the fraud and trust & safety space and want to teach companies how they can protect themselves, their users and create frictionless experiences for legitimate consumers. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, Trust and Safety, you are heavily experienced in detecting and acting on multiple types of online abuse from a technical and quantitative perspective. You've helped build tools, models and detection platforms at companies that have had to work through these threats at a global level.
Responsibilities
- Work with our Trust and Safety Architect and Data Science teams to surface emerging fraud patterns across the network escalate and proactively take them down.
- Detect patterns and turn those findings into sharper signals, tighter configurations, and smarter decisioning logic.
- Work across different verticals and closely with customers, partners and prospects with different risk appetites - some optimizing for approval rates, some minimizing chargebacks, some fighting account takeover and other types of abuse.
- Help build dashboards, tune models, decision logic and custom signals to help customers achieve their desired business outcomes
- Identify sources of false positives, possible coverage gaps and other vulnerabilities by digging into raw event streams; form a hypothesis, design a test and implement the fix
- Lead forensic investigations during fraud spikes: trace attack patterns to their source, identify the technique being used, deliver a clear writeup with remediation steps
- Distinguish between one-off anomalies and systemic gaps that indicate a product opportunity - and advocate for the latter with rigor
- Contribute to detection frameworks, investigative tooling, and internal playbooks that make every engineer and analyst at Sift more effective
- Be the conduit between customer reality and internal roadmap; your field observations should directly accelerate what Sift ships next
Requirements
- Required
- 5-8 years in fraud, trust & safety, risk, or a closely related technical domain - you've spent meaningful time working with fraud data, not just adjacent to it
- Strong SQL and Python skills; you reach for code to answer a question, not to build a pipeline
- Strong understanding of ML concepts applied to fraud: classification models, feature engineering, precision/recall tradeoffs, threshold calibration, score drift
- Experience analyzing large-scale behavioral or transactional datasets to find patterns and anomalies - you know what a fraud ring looks like in the data, not just in a textbook
- Ability to communicate technical findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders; you can write a forensic investigation report and present it to a VP of Risk in the same week
- Customer-facing experience; you understand that different businesses have different priorities, and that listening before optimizing is part of the job
- Hands-on experience with fraud detection platforms (in house or 3rd party)
- Hands-on experience building with AI: LLM APIs, prompt engineering, or agentic workflows - whether that's automating an investigation step, building a tool that surfaces patterns from raw data, or wiring together a multi-step agent to accelerate fraud analysis
- Familiarity with real-time event processing systems
- Experience with rules-based decisioning systems alongside ML - knowing when a hard rule beats a model score
- Background in payments, e-commerce, fintech, marketplace, or account security fraud
- Prior forward deployed, staff engineering, or embedded consulting experience at a technical product company
- Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Information Systems, Economics degree or equivalent
- Let's build it together:
- This document provides transparency around how Sift handles the personal data of job applicants: https://sift.com/recruitment-privacy
- A little about us:
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