Data Scientist - Merchant and Loyalty Rewards Protection Analyst, AVP

This role will advance detection and risk modeling strategies across merchant integrity and rewards ecosystems. This role will develop scalable behavioral models and detection frameworks that proactively identify merchant impersonation, inauthentic business activity, and loyalty/rewards exploitation.

This individual will translate emerging risk patterns into measurable signals and deploy analytic solutions that enhance enterprise protection controls. This role will manage and execute fraud analytics and fraud detection strategies supporting Citi’s North American and global credit card and retail bank businesses.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and optimize detection models addressing merchant impersonation, inauthentic entities, synthetic or coordinated activity, loyalty/rewards accrual and redemption anomalies, and promotion exploitation.
• Develop and refined both micro-level and macro-level portfolio-wide anomaly detection, linkages, and behavioral anomalies.
• Apply graph/network analytics to identify collusion or coordinated abuse patterns
• Own and optimize fraud rules, risk scores, and model thresholds.
• Monitor performance and iterate based on emerging patterns
• Translate intelligence into scalable detection logic.
• Provide quantitative recommendations to enhance controls and reduce exposure.
• Partner with Fraud Strategy, Fraud Policy, Intelligence, and Product Teams.
• Prioritize and provide a clear line of sight to the most critical work to partners and team members.
• Mentor and coach junior team members.

Qualifications :

• Bachelor’s Degree required in statistics, mathematics, physics, economics, or other analytical or quantitative discipline.
• 3+ years experience in analytics and modeling or relevant area
• Extensive experience working with:
• Big Data environment with hands on coding experience within various traditional (SAS, SQL, etc.) and/or open source (i.e. Python, Impala, Hive, etc.) tools.
• Traditional and advanced machine learning techniques and algorithms, such as Logistic Regression, Gradient Boosting, Random Forests, etc.
• Data visualization tools, such as Tableau
• Excellent quantitative and analytic skills; ability to derive patterns, trends and insights, and perform risk/reward trade-off analysis
• Ability to build effective presentations to communicate analytical findings to a wide array of audiences.
• Effective cross-functional project, resource, and stakeholder engagement and management, with ability to effectively drive collaboration across teams.
• Ability to make decisions independently with minimal guidance from management.

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Job Family Group:

Decision Management

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Job Family:

Business Analysis

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Time Type:

Full time

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Primary Location:

Jacksonville Florida United States

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Primary Location Full Time Salary Range:

$87,280.00 - $130,920.00

In addition to salary, Citi’s offerings may also include, for eligible employees, discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards. Citi offers competitive employee benefits, including: medical, dental & vision coverage; 401(k); life, accident, and disability insurance; and wellness programs. Citi also offers paid time off packages, including planned time off (vacation), unplanned time off (sick leave), and paid holidays. For additional information regarding Citi employee benefits, please visit citibenefits.com. Available offerings may vary by jurisdiction, job level, and date of hire.

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Most Relevant Skills

Please see the requirements listed above.

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Other Relevant Skills

For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.

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Anticipated Posting Close Date:

Mar 05, 2026

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Citi is an equal opportunity employer, and qualified candidates will receive consideration without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by law.

 

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