Data Scientist, AI Engineering

Company Description

Candidly was founded in 2016 to flip the script on what it means to plan, borrow, repay, and save for college. Today, we’re the category leader with the market’s most comprehensive AI-driven student debt and savings optimization platform. We partner with hundreds of top employers, financial institutions, and retirement record keepers, positioning Candidly to serve more than 35 million Americans.

We’re already achieving incredible results — to date, we’ve helped our users get on track to eliminate more than $1.8B in student debt and pay off their loans 175,000 years quicker — and we’re seeking movers, shakers, innovators, and problem solvers to help take our mission even further.

Candidly is a high-growth, Series B startup, funded by leading investors including Altos Ventures, Aflac, Salesforce Ventures, UBS, Equal Opportunity Ventures, Impact Engine, Rethink Impact, Unum, and Cercano Management. Our fully remote, international team of 70 (and counting) includes alumni from Google, UBS, Twitter, Plaid, Prudential, LendingTree, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and more.

Job Description

As a Data Scientist focusing on AI Engineering at Candidly, you will primarily work on designing, developing, and deploying AI agents that enhance our financial wellness platform and serve our clients. You will partner closely with the product and engineering teams to create products and features that leverage Generative AI to enhance the user experience and improve engagement. You will contribute to projects ranging from designing and developing new AI agents, enhancing our existing agents in production, including evaluations, and contributing to Candidly’s AI platform as a backend engineer.

What You'll Do

• Agent Development: Design, build, and deploy AI Agents including custom tools, prompt engineering, orchestration workflows, and agent design patterns.
• Agent Evaluation and Tuning: Design evaluation strategies and metrics for assessing the efficacy of AI agents as well as identifying common failure modes. Ensure AI agents and systems are reliable and provide a good user experience.
• AI Platform Development: Contribute to the backend infrastructure powering Candidly's AI capabilities, including API development, data integrations, and data pipelines.
• Research & Innovation: Stay on the cutting edge of advancements in Generative AI space and evaluate new techniques for application within the Candidly AI platform.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Work closely with stakeholders across product, design, engineering, and leadership to translate complex AI concepts into actionable strategies and features.
• Data Storytelling: Present findings and insights in a compelling way to both technical and non-technical audiences, contributing to strategic decision-making.

What We're Looking For

• Experience: 2-5 years of experience in a data science, data engineer, machine learning engineer, or backend engineer role.
• Technical Skills:
  • Strong programming skills in Python and proficiency with libraries such as LangGraph, PyTorch, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Pandas + Numpy.
  • Strong understanding of agentic systems, AI agent design patterns, and best practices for evaluating AI agents. Including, but not limited to, multi-agent systems and parallelized agentic workflows.
  • Hands on experience with foundational model APIs (OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini) and at least one AI Agent framework (LangGraph / CrewAI / Pydantic AI).
  • Hands on experience with database systems especially in regard to vector databases and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches.
  • Previous experience working in a production environment and deploying code to production for example machine learning models, data pipelines, or AI agents.
  • Intermediate level data and analytical skills, with at least some familiarity of SQL and data visualization.
  • Familiarity with software development practices and tools, such as code reviews, GitHub / GitLab, and Jira.
  • Familiarity with backend systems with a focus on serving Generative AI applications.
  • Basic knowledge of web systems with a focus on understanding how AI agents operate within both a web backend and frontend.
  • Basic knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS).

• Soft Skills:
  • Strong communication skills and ability to explain complex concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
  • High adaptability and comfort working in a dynamic, fast-paced startup environment.
  • Proactive, with a passion for building impactful solutions that address real-world challenges.
  • A love of experimenting and working with new tools and technologies

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in FinTech, financial services, or consumer lending domains.
• Strong enough technical ability to own and deploy projects end to end.
• Previous experience deploying and evaluating AI agents in a production setting.

Background and EEOC

Candidly offers for employment are conditioned upon satisfactory completion of our employment screening process (including, but not limited to, a review of past employment and education records, background investigation, and/or credit check & fingerprints).

Candidly strives to foster an environment where every employee can succeed. As an Equal Opportunity Employer we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, age, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, veteran status, or any other basis covered by applicable law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.