Data Scientist, NLP – United States – Remote

Company Overview

Founded in 2016, Candidly is revolutionizing the way students plan, borrow, repay, and save for college. As a leader in the market, we offer the most comprehensive AI-driven platform for student debt and savings optimization. Our partnerships with top employers, financial institutions, and retirement record keepers enable us to serve over 35 million Americans.

To date, we’ve helped users eliminate more than $1.8 billion in student debt, accelerating loan repayments by 175,000 years. We are seeking innovative problem solvers to join us on our mission to enhance financial wellness.

Candidly is a rapidly growing Series B startup backed by prominent investors, including Altos Ventures, Aflac, Salesforce Ventures, UBS, Equal Opportunity Ventures, Impact Engine, Rethink Impact, Unum, and Cercano Management. Our fully remote team of 70+ professionals includes alumni from Google, UBS, Twitter, Plaid, Prudential, LendingTree, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank.

Role Overview

As a Data Scientist specializing in AI at Candidly, you will design, develop, and deploy AI-driven features that enhance our financial wellness platform. Collaborating closely with product and engineering teams, you’ll leverage natural language processing (NLP) to improve user experience, engagement, and operational efficiency. Your projects will range from OCR to conversational AI, utilizing both structured and unstructured data to create innovative financial tools.

Key Responsibilities

• LLM Product Development: Create machine learning models to support AI-driven product features and personalized user experiences.
• Natural Language Processing: Develop and deploy NLP models to extract insights from user interactions and deliver intelligent financial guidance.
• Text Classification & Sentiment Analysis: Build models to classify user queries and analyze sentiment to inform product enhancements.
• Named Entity Recognition (NER): Design and train models to extract specific entities from text.
• Topic Modeling & Content Recommendation: Implement techniques like LDA and BERTopic to categorize user inquiries and generate personalized advice.
• Intent Recognition: Develop models to accurately identify user intents from text or voice inputs for intuitive interactions.
• Data Strategy & Engineering: Collaborate with data engineering teams to define data requirements, build ETL pipelines, and deploy models in production.
• Model Evaluation & Tuning: Conduct testing and optimization of deployed models to ensure reliability and impact.
• Research & Innovation: Stay updated on AI/ML advancements and evaluate new techniques for the Candidly platform.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Work with cross-functional teams to translate complex AI concepts into actionable strategies.
• Data Storytelling: Present insights to technical and non-technical audiences, contributing to strategic decision-making.

Requirements

• Experience: 3-5 years in a data science role, with a strong focus on NLP projects.
• Technical Skills:
  • Proficient in Python and familiar with libraries like TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-Learn, NLTK, SpaCy, and Hugging Face.
  • Expertise in NLP techniques, including BERT, GPT, and transformer architectures.
  • Experience in designing and deploying NLP pipelines for tasks like NER and text classification.
  • Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS) for model deployment.
  • Experience with SQL and data visualization tools is a plus.
  • Passion for experimenting with new tools and technologies.
• Soft Skills:
  • Strong communication skills to explain complex concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
  • High adaptability and comfort in a dynamic startup environment.
  • Proactive attitude and a desire to build impactful solutions to real-world challenges.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in FinTech, financial services, or consumer lending.
• Proven track record of developing AI/ML solutions focused on user engagement or personalized recommendations.
• Hands-on experience with conversational AI, reinforcement learning, or advanced NLP techniques.

Background and Equal Employment Opportunity

Offers of employment at Candidly are contingent upon satisfactory completion of our employment screening process, which may include a review of past employment, education, and background checks.

Candidly is committed to fostering an inclusive environment where every employee can thrive. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status. All employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit, and business needs.