What We'll Bring

At TransUnion, we have a welcoming and energetic environment that encourages collaboration and innovation. We are consistently exploring new technologies and tools to be agile. This environment gives our people the opportunity to hone current skills and build new capabilities, while discovering their genius.

Come be a part of our team – you’ll work with great people, pioneering products and cutting-edge technology.

Protecting the health and wellness of our associates and candidates considering a career at TransUnion is our highest priority. In supporting this vision, our recruitment and new hire experience for this role is fully virtual for the time being. Candidates interviewing will get to know our team over the phone and video, and this role will operate virtually upon hire until we return to the office. Even though we’re not physically together right now, our goal is to provide you a supportive candidate and new hire experience that will immerse you in our culture and set you up for success at TransUnion.

What You'll Bring

Ten (10) or more years of professional experience performing applied data science or analytic consulting work in Financial Services, consumer credit, or a related industry

Five (5) or more years in progressively more challenging team management and leadership roles.

Master’s or PhD degree in statistics, applied mathematics, financial mathematics, engineering, operations research, computer science or another highly quantitative field. A track record of academic excellence.

Deep, hands-on expertise applying machine learning, statistical inference, and predictive modeling methods in a commercial setting (including rare event modeling, anomaly detection, and transaction analytics)

Proficiency in one or more analytic languages (R, Python)

Proven ability to architect and engineer machine-learning pipelines with online / real-time features

Current knowledge of and strong interest in identity fraud trends and dynamics.

Ability to speak authoritatively with customers on relevant topics.

Ability to collaborate with customers to frame and define ill-structured problems and design effective solution approaches.

An excellent oral and written communicator with highly technical and non-technical TU leaders, partners, and customers. A proven ability to establish rapport, persuade others, ask insightful questions, and promote understanding across all levels of the organization.

Substantial prior experience making formal presentations to large and senior-level groups, as well as in smaller and less formal settings.

A champion of change, able to influence others to adopt new concepts and practices.

An effective time and project manager, able to balance a highly variable workload in a fast-paced environment.

A critical thinker and creative problem solver.

Availability to travel up to 25%.

What We'd Love to See:

Consultative approach to decision-making, ability to gather and synthesize multiple perspectives

Aptitude and passion for design of highly effective processes

Proficiency in one or more general-purpose programming languages (C/C++, Java), follows software engineering best practices to generate performant and implementable code

Experience manipulating large datasets in SQL

Experience with big data frameworks (Hadoop, Spark, Ab Initio, Redshift)

Experience with cloud computing (AWS, Azure, GCP)

Experience serving highly regulated industries

Familiarity with credit bureau data and business practices

Impact You'll Make

As a leader in Data Science & Analytics (DSA), the Sr. Director directs multiple teams composed of experienced managers, analytic professionals, and data scientists in the design, development, and implementation of custom solutions and products for both external and internal customers. Responsibilities include independent execution of the full range of personnel-related functions (talent acquisition and pipeline management, training, development, goal setting, and performance management) and business functions (revenue planning, budgeting, capacity planning, resource allocation, project management, work measurement, management reporting, and M&A support). The Sr. Director proactively participates in the development of operating policies and procedures of significant scope and complexity to promote operational excellence across Data Science & Analytics and Global Fraud Solutions.

The DSA Global Fraud Leader drives core components of TransUnion’s Global Fraud Strategy as part of the DSA Methods & Tools department with a dotted-line reporting relationship to the program lead in Global Fraud Solutions. In particular, and in close collaboration with matrix partners across multiple business units, they will:

Distill broad program objective to set the gold standard for precise, actionable consumer insight that organizations rely on to reduce fraud and better serve their good customers into concrete and achievable data science deliverables, estimating resource requirements and identifying dependencies for consideration by sponsors and stakeholders

Advise sponsors and stakeholders on the capabilities and potential value of proposed vendors, partners, and acquisition targets, including commercial and open-source software tools and frameworks

Develop a global data management framework and coordinate with TU Legal to help make global compliance a competitive advantage

Curate a robust repository of internally and externally sourced analytic data assets, constructing pipelines, preserving data quality, implementing appropriate privacy and compliance controls, maximizing utility for a broad and growing set of fraud use cases, maintaining a complete data dictionary, and publishing relevant insights.

Support the development of efficient and effective linking methods contributing to a comprehensive identity graph and use them to enrich the analytic data repository

Identify TransUnion data assets maintained outside of the Global Fraud organization with potential applicability to fraud use cases. Link and append to the analytic data repository as appropriate.

Apply data science and machine learning methods to proactively interrogate the repository to identify and derive features associated with relevant fraud behaviors, both within and across sources, and including outcomes

Develop features, models, and templates that support customers’ need to maximize fraud capture and conversion (and ultimately profitability), using relevant supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods, in collaboration with the Global Fraud organization and other stakeholders (potentially including vertical-specific models)

Support efforts to productionalize analytic code, automate relevant processes, architect model deployment paths, and develop new revenue-generating services in collaboration with Global Technology

Support Sales in demonstrating efficacy and value, arming client-facing DSA Associates with tools to help drive adoption and revenue

Engage directly with external customers as needed to support strategic opportunities and refine our understanding of key requirements

Support tighter integration of analytic and production workflows (e.g., capturing performance for analytic purposes, enabling models in an adaptive control setting, developing models on dynamic or streaming data)

Adopt and enforce use of common frameworks for efficient development and deployment of solutions that have global applicability

Maintain current knowledge of relevant machine learning research, open-source tools, commercial software, and competitors’ offerings

Contribute novel methods and research findings to TransUnion IP, potentially including patents

Evangelize the team’s unique capabilities, regularly developing and delivering thought leadership content in conjunction with broader DSA capability marketing efforts, in collaboration with matrix partners in Marketing and Solutions Marketing.

Leverage and coordinate with adjacent initiatives bearing on analytic capabilities, including Project Rise and Prama

Assemble, maintain, and lead a geographically dispersed, high-performing team of data scientists with specialized domain and technical expertise in accordance with DSA global standards