---
title: 'Lead Data Scientist at Middesk'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-data-scientist-middesk-san-francisco-0kckvxae1vzr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Lead Data Scientist at Middesk

- **Company:** Middesk
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $210k–$250k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-05-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/middesk/7fd5aeb2-c33c-4f0a-ad3d-2161201bc174/application

**Skills:** Machine Learning, Risk Modeling, Fraud Detection, Trust & Safety, Knowledge Graphs, Entity Resolution, Feature Stores, Model Management, ML Pipelines, LLMs, Graph-based Techniques, Weak Supervision, B2B SaaS, ML Pipeline Automation, End-to-end Training Harnesses

> Middesk seeks a Lead Data Scientist to build production ML models for risk, fraud, and identity verification. The role involves tackling complex data challenges, establishing ML infrastructure, and mentoring peers in a hybrid San Francisco/New York setting.

## 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 are actively building AI-driven applications that streamline customer workflows, focusing on business onboarding. With our proprietary identity data assets and deep domain expertise, we are uniquely positioned to expand into a broader set of AI-powered solutions that drive long-term growth. We’re looking for a hands-on applied ML expert to help build the technical foundation for these efforts. Ideally you have shipped external-facing models in the risk/fraud space and know the messy realities of imbalanced data, low labels, and changing behavior. This is a highly technical, hands-on role with wide influence on how we design, build, and scale ML 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 risk & fraud ML applications: Deliver production ML models in fraud, trust & safety, KYB, and compliance domains, with measurable impact on customer workflows.
- Tackle hard data problems: Work on classification problems with extreme class imbalance, sparse signals, and “cold start” label challenges.
- Innovate in feature engineering & labeling: Use graph-based techniques, weak supervision, LLMs, and AI agents to improve signal extraction and automate labeling process.
- Establish ML infrastructure foundations: Partner with the ML infra team to design feature services, model training pipeline, model serving standards, and orchestration to scale multiple ML use cases.
- Design and implement knowledge graph solutions: Leveraging LLMs for graph construction, querying, and retrieval to enhance entity resolution and business identity use cases.

What We're Looking For:

- 7+ years of production ML experience in one or more of the following areas:
- Building Production ML for risk, fraud, credit, or trust & safety: Track record of shipping external-facing ML applications in one or more of these domains.
- Knowledge graph applications: Hands-on experience building, querying, or extracting signals from knowledge graphs—ideally over business entity networks (companies, persons, addresses, relationships) to support identity verification, fraud detection, or risk decisioning.
- Entity resolution for business or individual identities: Experience disambiguating and linking records across noisy, incomplete, or conflicting data sources—particularly in KYB, KYC, AML, or identity verification contexts where the same real-world entity may appear under different names, addresses, or tax IDs.
- Expertise in classification with real-world ML challenges, for example: imbalanced labels, sparse signals, cold start, and production version management.
- Hands-on ML infrastructure experience: feature stores, model management, ML training/serving pipelines.
- Comfort as a senior IC: setting technical direction, mentoring peers, and establishing best practices.

Nice-To Have:

- B2B SaaS experience, ideally building ML products for enterprise customers.
- ML pipeline and automation engineering: Experience building end-to-end training harnesses that automate feature engineering, data validation, and model training.
- Experience scaling ML across multiple products or risk domains.

## 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)

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