Data Scientist

The Company

PayPal has been revolutionizing commerce globally for more than 25 years. Creating innovative experiences that make moving money, selling, and shopping simple, personalized, and secure, PayPal empowers consumers and businesses in approximately 200 markets to join and thrive in the global economy. 

We operate a global, two-sided network at scale that connects hundreds of millions of merchants and consumers. We help merchants and consumers connect, transact, and complete payments, whether they are online or in person. PayPal is more than a connection to third-party payment networks. We provide proprietary payment solutions accepted by merchants that enable the completion of payments on our platform on behalf of our customers.

We offer our customers the flexibility to use their accounts to purchase and receive payments for goods and services, as well as the ability to transfer and withdraw funds. We enable consumers to exchange funds more safely with merchants using a variety of funding sources, which may include a bank account, a PayPal or Venmo account balance, PayPal and Venmo branded credit products, a credit card, a debit card, certain cryptocurrencies, or other stored value products such as gift cards, and eligible credit card rewards.  Our PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom products also make it safer and simpler for friends and family to transfer funds to each other. We offer merchants an end-to-end payments solution that provides authorization and settlement capabilities, as well as instant access to funds and payouts. We also help merchants connect with their customers, process exchanges and returns, and manage risk. We enable consumers to engage in cross-border shopping and merchants to extend their global reach while reducing the complexity and friction involved in enabling cross-border trade. 

Our beliefs are the foundation for how we conduct business every day.  We live each day guided by our core values of Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, and Wellness. Together, our values ensure that we work together as one global team with our customers at the center of everything we do – and they push us to ensure we take care of ourselves, each other, and our communities.

Job Summary:

What You Need to Know About the Role
Each Data Scientist on this team has full ownership of a portfolio of merchants and is responsible for end-to-end management of loss and decline rates. Day-to-day duties include data analysis, monitoring and forecasting, creating and implementing risk rules and strategies, providing requirements to data scientists and technology teams on attribute, model, and platform needs, and communicating with global stakeholders to ensure the best possible customer experience while meeting loss-rate targets.

Meet Our Team
PayPal’s Global Fraud Protection team partners with global business units to manage a variety of risks—including identity fraud, account takeover, stolen-financial fraud, and credit issues—while contributing directly to PayPal’s bottom-line savings, ensuring safe and secure global growth, and delivering an outstanding customer experience. This opportunity is within the Large Merchant and Markets Fraud Risk team, which covers PayPal’s newest, leading-edge payments solutions (Risk-as-Service, Fastlane, PayPal Complete Payments, etc.) as well as customized experiences for our highest-priority strategic markets and partnerships. This will be a Dublin based role, as such you will have the requisite right-to-work in Ireland, and no relocation costs can be supported.

Job Description:

Your Way to Impact:

You will be the Data Scientist in the Fraud Risk team, leading new projects to build and improve risk strategies that prevent fraud—leveraging both PayPal’s proprietary Risk tooling and custom AI/ML models. In this role, you’ll partner with the corresponding Business Units to align with and influence their strategic priorities, educate business partners about risk-management principles, and collaboratively optimize risk treatments and customer experiences for these targeted products and partnerships.

Day-to-Day Responsibilities:

In your day to day, you will:

• Take full responsibility for a merchant portfolio’s fraud and loss metrics, ensuring end-to-end management of decline and loss rates.

• Work closely with cross-functional teams to develop fraud-prevention strategies, identify loss-savings opportunities, and optimize transaction declines without increasing customer friction.

• Deliver risk analytics on frustration trends and key performance indicators, set up alerts for fraud events, and monitor real-time dashboards to detect anomalies.

• Help adapt PayPal’s advanced proprietary fraud-prevention tools—combining them with custom data and AI/ML techniques—to enable continued business growth.

• Provide clear, data-driven requirements to Data Science and Technology teams for attribute engineering, model specifications, and platform improvements, while keeping global stakeholders informed of performance and next steps.

What You’ll Bring:

• 2–4 years working with large-scale, complex datasets—ideally within fraud-risk, financial services, or a similarly regulated environment.

• Strong ability to decompose business requirements into a structured analytic plan, execute that plan end-to-end, and derive actionable insights.

• Excellent verbal and written skills, equally comfortable discussing technical details with engineers and high-level risk strategies with business leaders.

• A desire to build new solutions, invent novel approaches to big, ambiguous challenges, and iterate quickly as new fraud trends emerge

• Solid working knowledge of Excel, SQL, and Python or R for data wrangling, exploration, and analysis.

• Expertise in exploratory data analysis and preparing clean, structured datasets for model development.

• Hands-on experience applying AI/ML techniques—both supervised (regression, classification, decision trees) and unsupervised (clustering, anomaly detection)—for business decisioning.

• Familiarity with model evaluation metrics (Precision, Recall, ROC-AUC) and basic statistical concepts.

Preferred Qualification:

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting spectacular candidates. Please don’t hesitate to apply.

Subsidiary:

PayPal

Travel Percent:

0

For the majority of employees, PayPal's balanced hybrid work model offers 3 days in the office for effective in-person collaboration and 2 days at your choice of either the PayPal office or your home workspace, ensuring that you equally have the benefits and conveniences of both locations.

Our Benefits:

At PayPal, we’re committed to building an equitable and inclusive global economy. And we can’t do this without our most important asset—you. That’s why we offer benefits to help you thrive in every stage of life. We champion your financial, physical, and mental health by offering valuable benefits and resources to help you care for the whole you.

We have great benefits including a flexible work environment, employee shares options, health and life insurance and more. To learn more about our benefits please visit https://www.paypalbenefits.com.

Who We Are:

Click Here to learn more about our culture and community.

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion 

PayPal provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.  In addition, PayPal will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.  If you are unable to submit an application because of incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at talentaccommodations@paypal.com.  

Belonging at PayPal: 

Our employees are central to advancing our mission, and we strive to create an environment where everyone can do their best work with a sense of purpose and belonging. Belonging at PayPal means creating a workplace with a sense of acceptance and security where all employees feel included and valued. We are proud to have a diverse workforce reflective of the merchants, consumers, and communities that we serve, and we continue to take tangible actions to cultivate inclusivity and belonging at PayPal.

Any general requests for consideration of your skills, please Join our Talent Community.

We know the confidence gap and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting spectacular candidates. Please don’t hesitate to apply.