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Principal Data Scientist, Fraud Modelling

Impact.com

Posted 3 months agoCape Town, South Africa

Location

Cape Town, South Africa

Job Type

Full-time

Experience

Mid-Level

Category

Engineering

Job Description

From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products—Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands, including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics, rely on impact.com to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results. About the Role We're seeking a Senior Data Scientist specializing in Fraud and Risk to join our Cape Town Data Science team. In this role, you'll be at the forefront of protecting our affiliate marketing ecosystem by researching, developing, and deploying ML models that detect and prevent fraud across attribution, lead quality, and partner compliance. You'll work on high-impact problems spanning traditional fraud patterns and emerging threats—from attribution manipulation to browser extension abuse—while building production systems that scale. This is an opportunity to combine rigorous analytical work with tangible business impact in a fast-moving, adversarial domain. Core Responsibilities Research & model development Conduct R&D on fraud detection and risk monitoring across the digital advertising ecosystem, including attribution fraud, lead fraud, click injection, browser extension abuse (e.g., Honey-style coupon hijacking), brand safety violations, and creator authenticity verification. Stay ahead of emerging fraud patterns through continuous learning—monitoring industry trends, reviewing academic literature, exploring data for novel anomalies, and collaborating closely with Product, Compliance, and Trust & Safety teams. Production deployment & iteration Deploy Fraud and Risk ML models to production;
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Requirements

  • Technical skills: Strong Python and SQL; proficiency with ML libraries (scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, or similar)
  • Familiarity with production ML workflows (versioning, monitoring, A/B testing, model retraining)
  • Education: Bachelor's in a quantitative field (CS, Statistics, Math, Engineering, or similar); Master's/PhD preferred.
  • Familiarity with browser extension detection, fingerprinting, or device/user identity resolution.
  • Knowledge of privacy-preserving ML techniques or working with privacy-constrained data.
  • Experience with real-time or near-real-time scoring and low-latency deployment (e.g., REST APIs, streaming pipelines)
  • Familiarity with GCP tools (BigQuery, Vertex AI, Cloud Run) and/or Databricks/Spark for large-scale data processing.
  • Exposure to rule engines, decision trees, or hybrid rule-ML systems for compliance and risk workflows.
  • What sets you apart Adversarial thinki.

Responsibilities

  • Translate analytical findings into actionable recommendations for Product, Marketing, and Finance stakeholders.
  • Build dashboards and reports to communicate model performance, fraud impact, and risk metrics to leadership.
  • Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform.
  • Design, prototype, and validate ML models and rule-based systems for fraud detection, partner risk scoring, compliance monitoring, and trust & safety workflows.
  • Research and apply graph-based fraud detection techniques (community detection, link analysis, behavioral clustering) and explore graph database applications for modeling relationships between users, devices, transactions, and partners to uncover coordinated fraud rings and suspicious network patterns.

Benefits

  • Benefits and Perks: At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work.
  • That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.
  • Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge.
  • Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority.
  • We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
  • Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning.
  • Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.

How to Apply

Apply via the Impact.com careers portal.

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