Machine Learning Lead
Software Engineering
Chicago, IL, USA
USD 160k-220k / year + Equity
About Coinflow
Coinflow is the next-generation payment service provider revolutionizing global financial infrastructure with stablecoins, AI-driven fraud prevention, and instant settlement. Coinflow enables businesses to grow faster with instant settlement, fraud & chargeback indemnity, global pay-ins, multi-currency FX, and unified payouts. Founded in 2023, the company serves marketplaces, fintechs, remittance providers, gaming platforms, and ecommerce merchants worldwide.
Since our seed round in 2024, we’ve achieved 23x revenue growth and scaled to multi-billion-dollar annual transaction volume. In response to this growth, Coinflow announced a $25M Series A in October 2025—led by Pantera Capital, CMT Digital, Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, and Reciprocal Ventures—accelerating our mission to power the world’s fastest-moving businesses with innovative, reliable global payments.
Coinflow is proudly headquartered in Chicago, IL. Learn more at coinflow.cash.
Role Overview:
Coinflow is seeking a Machine Learning Lead to own the fraud and risk intelligence layer at the core of our platform.
This is a zero-to-one role. You will be our second dedicated ML hire and will build our fraud detection and risk decisioning capabilities from the ground up. That means digging into large-scale transaction and behavioral data, building and shipping production fraud models, defining what good looks like, and continuously raising the bar on detection and precision as our volume and merchant base scales.
The ideal candidate has hands-on experience building fraud models on the acquiring side of payments—card-present or card-not-present, authorization decisioning, chargeback reduction, or related risk systems—and is motivated by the challenge of building something that does not yet exist.
Key Responsibilities
Build Coinflow's fraud detection and risk decisioning capabilities from zero, including feature engineering, model development, and production deployment
Own the full model lifecycle: experimentation, evaluation, monitoring, and iteration
Define and track core fraud and risk metrics—detection rate, false positive rate, chargeback rate, dispute win rate—and continuously improve them
Explore transaction and behavioral data to surface new fraud signals and emerging attack patterns
Partner with Engineering, Product, and Operations to embed fraud intelligence directly into payment flows and internal tooling
Establish the foundation for ML and data practices across the company
-
Help shape Coinflow's long-term fraud, risk, and ML roadmap
Required Qualifications
5+ years of experience in machine learning, applied data science, or production ML roles
Demonstrated experience building fraud models in payments, with direct exposure to the acquiring side—acquirer, PSP, or payment facilitator environment
Proven track record of taking an Machine Learning project from ideation to finished product, from proof of concept notebooking to fully-deployed, productionalized modeling systems.
Experience in developing, managing, and scaling MLops pipelines and monitoring systems to manage retraining schedules and RT metrics for performance visibility.
Experience in scoping cloud computational requirements for scalable ML projects across storage accounts, containers, virtual machines, clusters, and sizes.
Deep familiarity with acquiring-side fraud dynamics: authorization fraud, card-not-present fraud, friendly fraud, chargeback patterns, and merchant risk
Experience taking fraud or risk models from zero to production in a real system
Strong foundation in ML, statistics, and feature engineering on high-volume financial data
Comfortable owning ambiguous problems end-to-end and creating structure where none exists
Strong collaborator with the ability to work across Engineering, Product, and Ops
Preferred Qualifications
Experience at an acquirer, ISO, PayFac, or payments infrastructure company
Familiarity with card network rules, dispute/chargeback workflows, and fraud liability frameworks
Experience as an early or sole ML hire at a startup
Exposure to real-time or near-real-time fraud scoring systems
-
Experience with stablecoin, crypto, or alternative payment rails (a plus, not a requirement)
What We Offer:
Competitive compensation including base salary, performance bonus, and meaningful ownership
Opportunity to build the fraud and risk intelligence layer of a rapidly scaling fintech company
Collaborative and innovative work environment with world-class investors
Direct impact on core risk infrastructure and company trajectory during a hypergrowth phase
The base salary range for this role is $160,000 to $220,000 USD. The actual base salary offered depends on a variety of factors, including but not limited to experience, education, skills, qualifications and business needs.
In addition, the employee who fills this role will be eligible for an equity grant, allowing you to share in the long-term success of the company. You will also have access to a wide array of benefits, including health and wellness benefits, 401(k) savings plan, and flexible time off.
Join the team rewriting how money moves worldwide—and become a driving force in the $194 trillion cross-border payments market.