Principal Research Scientist [Risk, Plata Cerebro]

We are looking for a Principal Research Scientist to lead the development of foundation models for Risk & Decisioning, the team that powers credit decisions for Plata’s 3M+ customers.

You will define the technical direction of our modeling work and take models from research all the way to production, partnering closely with Risk, Product, and Data teams on priorities and roadmap. This is a hands-on principal role: you will set the engineering standard for the team, build production-grade models yourself, and see their impact directly in cost of risk, approval rates, and portfolio NPV.

Challenges that await you:

• Build an end-to-end foundation model over financial event sequences - transactions, credit bureau data, and in-app behavioral events with subsequent fine-tuning for downstream business tasks: underwriting (PD), credit limit strategy, fraud detection, collections, and propensity models

• Drive technical decisions end-to-end: methodology → implementation → performance and latency → robustness, interpretability, and regulatory compliance

• Take models from research to production: training infrastructure, evaluation frameworks, model serving, latency/cost optimization, and monitoring

• Research state-of-the-art approaches in the industry, publish your own work, and speak at leading conferences

• Mentor senior engineers and scientists; own technical standards for model development across the team (design reviews, evaluation methodology, deployment practices).

• Communicate results clearly to cross-functional stakeholders: product, risk, business, and leadership

What makes you a great fit:

• Proven experience applying deep learning to sequential data - transformer architectures on event/transaction sequences strongly preferred, but not required

• Strong foundation in mathematical statistics and probability theory

• Deep understanding of machine learning algorithms (GBM, MLP, CNN, RNN, Transformers, etc.)

• Experience taking large models to production: distributed training, model serving, latency/cost trade-offs

• Ability to strike a reasonable balance between solution complexity and practical applicability

• Strong mathematical or technical education - degree in mathematics, physics, or CS from a top technical university

• Kaggle Competitions Master/Grandmaster or equivalent (a plus); experience developing models in banking or consumer lending (a plus)

• Strong communication skills

Our ways of working:

• Innovative Spirit: a commitment to creativity and groundbreaking solutions

• Honest Feedback: valuing open, transparent communication

• Supportive Team: a strong, collaborative community

• Celebrating Achievements: recognizing our wins together

• High-Tech Environment: a team full of smart and revolutionary people who date to challenge the status quo of incumbent finances

Our benefits:

• Relocation support to one of our hubs - Mexico, Cyprus, Spain with assistance for the employee and their family

• Flexible work from one of our offices or remote

• Healthcare coverage

• Education budget: language lessons, professional training and certifications

• Wellness budget : mental health and fitness activity reimbursements

• Vacation Policy: Annual leave and paid sick leave as per applicable policies