Applied AI/ML Lead - Vice President - Payments

hackajob is collaborating with J.P. Morgan to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

JOB DESCRIPTION

As part of the Commercial & Investment Bank, JPMorgan Chase Payments enables organizations of all sizes to execute transactions efficiently and securely, transforming the movement of information, money, and assets. We tackle complex challenges across the payments lifecycle with solutions that facilitate seamless transactions across borders, industries, and platforms. Operating in over 160 countries and handling more than 120 currencies, we are a leading processor of USD payments with daily transaction volumes in the trillions.

As a Vice President, Applied AI/ML Lead (Sr Level IC role) within JPMorgan Chase Payments, you will own and drive the end-to-end delivery of high-impact AI/ML capabilities across the payments ecosystem - while remaining deeply hands-on. You will apply modern neural networks (including Transformers) to build, fine-tune, distill, and deploy models that improve fraud/risk outcomes, operational automation, and client experience, operating under real-world constraints (latency, scale, reliability, explainability, and governance). You will set technical direction, establish standards, and lead execution through influence - partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Risk, Compliance, and Data teams.

Job responsibilities

• Own a major AI/ML problem area end-to-end (e.g., transaction risk & fraud, anomaly detection, payment exceptions automation, routing/authorization optimization), from opportunity sizing and problem framing through production rollout and iteration.
• Design and build production-grade ML systems that operate at payments scale, balancing accuracy, latency, throughput, and cost across batch, near-real-time, and real-time inference patterns.
• Develop state-of-the-art neural approaches including Transformer architectures, representation learning, and sequence/graph methods where appropriate; apply fine-tuning (full/parameter-efficient), distillation, and model compression techniques to meet deployment constraints.
• Define rigorous evaluation and measurement: offline metrics, calibration, robustness testing, segmentation, and online experimentation where feasible; translate model lift into business impact (loss reduction, approval rates, false-positive reduction, ops productivity, client outcomes).
• Establish model lifecycle standards: reproducibility, testing, monitoring/alerting, drift detection, champion - challenger approaches, incident response/rollback, and ongoing performance governance.
• Partner with Risk/Compliance and model governance stakeholders to ensure appropriate documentation, controls, explainability/interpretability as required, and audit-ready processes.
• Lead through influence: drive technical decisions via design reviews, code/model reviews, and mentoring; raise the bar across applied scientists and ML engineers through best practices and pragmatic standards.
• Communicate clearly to senior stakeholders, including tradeoffs, limitations, and recommended actions; make complex model behavior and risk/benefit understandable and decision-ready.

Required qualifications, capabilities, and skills

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, Operations Research, or related field, plus 6+ years of industry experience delivering applied ML (or PhD with equivalent applied experience).
• Demonstrated track record of shipping ML models into production with measurable business impact, including iteration post-launch (monitoring, retraining, recalibration, and continuous improvement).
• Strong hands-on expertise in neural networks and Transformers, including practical experience with:
  • Fine-tuning strategies (e.g., full fine-tuning and parameter-efficient methods)
  • Distillation / compression (teacher - student, quantization-aware approaches, latency/cost-driven optimization)
  • Robust evaluation and failure-mode analysis for real-world deployment
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, with deep experience in PyTorch or TensorFlow and standard ML/data libraries.
• Experience building data-driven systems using SQL and distributed processing (e.g., Spark/PySpark or equivalent).
• Cloud and production experience on AWS (or equivalent cloud), including deploying services/pipelines and operating them reliably at scale.
• Ability to take ambiguous business problems and turn them into structured ML plans: data strategy, modeling approach, evaluation, rollout, and operationalization.
• Excellent communication skills, including explaining tradeoffs (accuracy vs latency, risk vs customer friction, complexity vs maintainability) to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred qualifications, capabilities, and skills

• Payments domain experience: fraud/risk, transaction monitoring, identity/account takeover, disputes/chargebacks, sanctions/AML-adjacent signal work, payment exceptions and investigations, routing/authorization optimization, or treasury/transaction banking.
• Experience with streaming/real-time architectures and feature generation (e.g., event-driven systems, point-in-time correctness, leakage prevention).
• Strong ML platform/MLOps exposure: feature stores, model registries, CI/CD for ML, scalable training/inference, observability, and governance workflows.
• Experience with Docker/Kubernetes and modern data platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake) where relevant.

ABOUT US

JPMorganChase, one of the oldest financial institutions, offers innovative financial solutions to millions of consumers, small businesses and many of the world's most prominent corporate, institutional and government clients under the J.P. Morgan and Chase brands. Our history spans over 200 years and today we are a leader in investment banking, consumer and small business banking, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management.

We offer a competitive total rewards package including base salary determined based on the role, experience, skill set and location. Those in eligible roles may receive commission-based pay and/or discretionary incentive compensation, paid in the form of cash and/or forfeitable equity, awarded in recognition of individual achievements and contributions. We also offer a range of benefits and programs to meet employee needs, based on eligibility. These benefits include comprehensive health care coverage, on-site health and wellness centers, a retirement savings plan, backup childcare, tuition reimbursement, mental health support, financial coaching and more. Additional details about total compensation and benefits will be provided during the hiring process. 

We recognize that our people are our strength and the diverse talents they bring to our global workforce are directly linked to our success. We are an equal opportunity employer and place a high value on diversity and inclusion at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute, including race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital or veteran status, pregnancy or disability, or any other basis protected under applicable law. We also make reasonable accommodations for applicants' and employees' religious practices and beliefs, as well as mental health or physical disability needs. Visit our FAQs for more information about requesting an accommodation.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including Disability/Veterans

ABOUT THE TEAM

J.P. Morgan's Commercial & Investment Bank is a global leader across banking, markets, securities services and payments. Corporations, governments and institutions throughout the world entrust us with their business in more than 100 countries. The Commercial & Investment Bank provides strategic advice, raises capital, manages risk and extends liquidity in markets around the world.