--- title: 'Data Scientist at Middesk' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-scientist-middesk-san-francisco-szs70hnc4w9p' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-17' --- # Data Scientist at Middesk - **Company:** Middesk - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $155k–$180k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-05-01 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/middesk/f0da59d3-43fa-460b-88ea-4fc9c052b28c/application **Skills:** Applied Machine Learning, Classification Problems, Fraud Detection, Risk Management, Trust & Safety, Production System Deployment, Imbalanced Data Handling, Sparse Signal Analysis, Graph Databases, Network Analysis, Entity Linking, Knowledge Graphs, LLMs, Weak Supervision > Build AI-driven fraud and risk systems for business identity verification. The role involves designing production-grade detection mechanisms, leveraging graph-based approaches, and improving data quality using weak supervision and modern AI tools to handle messy, real-world data. ## Job description About Middesk: Middesk is building the data and intelligence infrastructure that helps businesses work together with confidence. We started by creating a comprehensive platform for understanding businesses, bringing together authoritative and proprietary data to help customers verify business identities, onboard customers faster, and manage risk throughout the customer lifecycle. Today, Middesk is used by more than 700 banks and fintechs, and in 2025 we verified more than 7 million companies. We've also expanded beyond business verification to help companies form, register, manage, and maintain their businesses, supporting more than 50,000 companies in setting up over 100,000 accounts required to hire employees, run payroll, and stay compliant. Middesk came out of Y Combinator, and is backed by Sequoia Capital, Accel, Insight Partners, and Canapi. We're proud to be named on the Forbes Fintech 50 and Best Startup Employers lists. About The Role: We’re building AI-driven applications that simplify customer workflows, starting with business onboarding. With our proprietary identity data and deep domain expertise, we’re in a strong position to expand into a broader set of intelligent, risk-aware products. We’re looking for a hands-on engineer to help build the foundation for these systems. This role is less about inventing new ML algorithms and more about applying the right techniques to messy, real-world problems. You’ve worked in fraud, risk, or trust domains, and you understand how bad actors behave, how data breaks, and how to still ship reliable systems anyway. This is a highly technical, hands-on role with broad influence over how we design, build, and scale data-driven systems at Middesk. We follow a hybrid work model, and for this role, there is an expectation of 2 days per week in our SF/NYC office. Candidates should be based within a commutable distance, as we believe in the value of in-person collaboration and building strong team connections while also supporting flexibility where possible. What You’ll Do: - Build fraud & risk systems Design and ship production systems that detect and prevent fraud across KYB, trust & safety, and compliance workflows. - Work with messy, real-world data Tackle problems with extreme class imbalance, sparse signals, evolving adversarial behavior, and limited ground truth. - Leverage relationships in data Apply graph-based approaches and entity resolution techniques to uncover hidden connections and improve risk detection. - Improve signal & labeling Use a mix of heuristics, weak supervision, and modern AI tools (including LLMs where appropriate) to generate better features and labels. - Help scale our infrastructure Partner with engineering to build and evolve systems for feature generation, model training, and production deployment across multiple use cases. What We’re Looking For: - 5+ years of experience in fraud, risk, or trust & safety You’ve worked on real-world fraud or abuse problems and understand the domain deeply. - Experience building and shipping production systems You’ve deployed models or data-driven systems that power external-facing products. - Strong foundation in applied ML or data systems Comfortable working on classification problems with real-world constraints like imbalanced data, sparse signals, and changing patterns. - Experience with graph or relational data approaches Familiarity with knowledge graphs, network analysis, or entity linking is strongly preferred. - Hands-on and pragmatic You focus on impact over perfection and know how to balance speed, accuracy, and maintainability. ## About Middesk ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Middesk is a business identity platform that helps companies verify, onboard, and monitor businesses with confidence, replacing slow manual processes with automated KYB (Know Your Business) and compliance infrastructure. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $77.5M total funding) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (with a second office in New York, NY) - **Founded**: 2019 - **Founders**: Kyle Mack (CEO) and Sean Higgins (CTO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Business identity verification, Know Your Business (KYB) compliance, fraud prevention, regulatory technology (RegTech), and financial infrastructure. - **Target customers**: B2B; primarily banks, fintechs, lenders, marketplaces, payroll & compliance platforms, and any company that needs to verify and onboard other businesses. - **Mission or purpose statement**: “We’re building the foundation trust runs on.” The company aims to make business identity reliable, transferable, and usable at scale so trust can move faster across the economy. ## Products & Services - **Middesk Platform (Verification/KYB)**: An automated system that verifies business identity by pulling data from 400+ authoritative sources. It enables auto-approval decisions, reduces manual review, and surfaces fraud signals like synthetic identities and ownership networks. - **Business Registration**: Helps companies register for payroll taxes and ensure compliance with state and federal requirements. - **Fraud Prevention**: Detects synthetic identities, maps ownership networks, and surfaces risk before it becomes exposure. - **Underwriting**: Provides data and insights to support underwriting decisions for lending and financial services. - **Monitoring**: Ongoing business monitoring to ensure compliance and detect changes in business status. - **API & Dashboard**: Modular toolkit that integrates directly into onboarding, risk, compliance, and operations workflows. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (private company). - **Key Metric**: Total funding of $77.5M across 3 rounds. Annual revenue estimated at $5.0M (per LinkedIn data). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (backed since 2018), Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners. Also named to the Forbes Fintech 50 List and cited as an industry leader by Liminal. - **Growth Signals**: - Ranked in the top 20% of the 2025 Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies. - Named a 2025 Fast Company World’s Most Innovative Company. - Named one of America’s Best Startup Employers 2025. - 120 employees (+26.5% YoY growth). - Over 500 customers across banking, fintech, lending, payments, and marketplaces. - Customers see 30% higher auto-approval rates and 60–70% less manual review. - Verifies and onboards over 5 million businesses annually. ## Competitive Advantages - **Data moat**: Pulls from 400+ authoritative sources (government agencies, credit bureaus, etc.), creating a comprehensive and accurate business identity dataset. - **Automation-first**: Designed to handle the majority of verifications automatically, letting human analysts focus only on exceptions. This drives operational leverage for customers. - **Audit-ready**: Every decision is documented and audit-ready from the start, which is critical for regulated industries. - **SOC 2 Type II compliant**: Rigorous security controls protecting customer-sensitive data. - **End-to-end platform**: Covers verification, fraud, registration, and monitoring in one system across the customer journey, reducing the need for multiple vendors. ## Strategic Focus - **Scaling the platform**: Continuing to expand the number of data sources and the breadth of business identity intelligence. - **Deepening regulated industry presence**: Specifically targeting banks, fintechs, lenders, and platforms where compliance and risk management are paramount. - **Product expansion**: Likely expanding into adjacent areas like enhanced due diligence (EDD), continuous monitoring, and more sophisticated fraud detection. - **International growth**: While currently US-focused, the platform’s infrastructure could expand to support global business verification. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Values transparency, ownership, and momentum. Core values include “Embrace ambition,” “Lead with curiosity,” “Win together,” and “Put customers first.” - **Work model**: Hybrid — employees are expected to be in the office at least 2 days per week (in San Francisco or New York). The company values in-person collaboration. - **Perks & benefits**: - Equity (stock options) for all full-time employees. - 3 months paid parental leave. - Annual learning & development budget. - Unlimited PTO (with encouragement to actually use it). - Medical, dental, and vision healthcare coverage. - 401(k) plan. - Pet-friendly offices with free snacks and drinks. - Flexible Spending Account (FSA). - Customized development tracks and promotion policies. - **Engineering culture**: Described as building “high-impact systems” with thoughtful, driven teammates. Roles include Software Engineer, Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineer, Data Scientist, and Lead Data Scientist. - **Recognition**: Named America’s Best Startup Employers 2025, indicating strong employee satisfaction and company health. ## Sources 1. [middesk.com](https://www.middesk.com/) 2. [middesk.com/careers](https://www.middesk.com/careers) 3. [middesk.com/about](https://www.middesk.com/about) 4. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/middesk) 5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/middesk) ## Other roles at Middesk - [Account Executive, Mid-Market](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-mid-market-middesk-new-york-b2vjnywfqrje) — New York, NY - [Support Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/support-associate-middesk-new-york-e2kgx0v6pxyz) — New York, NY - [Sales Development Representative](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-middesk-new-york-bjjyqbk9nnb2) — New York, NY - [Head of Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-partnerships-middesk-san-francisco-jj12tsxcxeg0) — San Francisco, CA - [Data Operations Associate](https://feeny.ai/job/data-operations-associate-middesk-new-york-0kea1x7nwtpr) — New York, NY - [Growth Lead, Accounts](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-lead-accounts-middesk-new-york-252wnxm555b2) — New York, NY - [Growth Lead, Organic](https://feeny.ai/job/growth-lead-organic-middesk-new-york-685jphmhnmky) — New York, NY - [Operations Analyst (Temporary)](https://feeny.ai/job/operations-analyst-temporary-middesk-new-york-zrsmzgvd4c09) — New York, NY - [Solutions Engineer, Mid Market](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-engineer-mid-market-middesk-new-york-8hkhb3qabej8) — New York, NY - [Group Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/group-product-manager-middesk-new-york-r7bqs21j82bh) — New York, NY