Data Scientist – Credit Risk (New Grad) – Discover Financial Services
Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS, acquired by Capital One in 2024) is one of the nation's largest digital banking and payment services companies — issuing the Discover card to 50+ million cardholders, operating the Discover and Pulse payment networks, and providing personal loans and student loans. Discover's data science team is responsible for the credit underwriting models, fraud detection algorithms, and customer analytics that determine creditworthiness for billions of dollars in credit decisions annually. Discover is well known in the industry for rigorous quantitative analytics, a collaborative culture, and excellent entry-level data scientist development programs. We are hiring New Grad Data Scientists in Riverwoods, IL to join Discover's credit analytics and risk science teams.
Responsibilities
- Build credit risk scorecards and ML models predicting credit card applicant default probability using traditional credit bureau features and alternative data sources
- Develop credit limit optimization models balancing revenue opportunity against credit loss risk for Discover's 50M+ cardholder portfolio
- Build transaction-level fraud detection models using sequence modeling (LSTM, transformers) to identify card-not-present fraud, account takeover, and bust-out fraud patterns
- Develop customer behavioral segmentation models identifying cardholder spending patterns, rewards redemption behavior, and balance transfer propensity for targeted marketing
- Build collections analytics models predicting the optimal outreach timing, channel, and settlement offer for delinquent accounts entering Discover's collections process
- Conduct model validation and monitoring — tracking scorecard performance stability, population stability index (PSI), and Gini coefficient degradation over time
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Statistics, Data Science, Mathematics, or Economics
- Strong statistical modeling skills — logistic regression, survival analysis, decision trees, gradient boosting
- Python and SQL proficiency for credit data analysis and ML model development
- Understanding of consumer credit concepts — FICO scores, credit bureau data, FCRA regulations
- Understanding of model risk management (MRM) and model validation practices in regulated financial services
Benefits
- Competitive salary with Discover annual incentive bonus
- Discover credit card with enhanced rewards and benefits for employees
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits
- 401(k) with Discover matching
- Riverwoods, IL campus — suburban Chicago location with excellent work-life balance and career development