Wells Fargo · 7 hours ago
Principal Engineer - Data Scientist
Charlotte, NC
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$159K/yr - $305K/yr
7+ years expWells Fargo is seeking a Principal Engineer in Technology as part of Cybersecurity. The role involves designing, developing, deploying, and continuously improving machine learning and advanced analytical models for fraud detection and cybersecurity threat detection, while working with massive datasets under strict regulatory constraints.
BankingFinancial ServicesFinTechInsurancePayments
Responsibilities
Act as an advisor to leadership to develop or influence applications, network, information security, database, operating systems, or web technologies for highly complex business and technical needs across multiple groups
Lead the strategy and resolution of highly complex and unique challenges requiring in-depth evaluation across multiple areas or the enterprise, delivering solutions that are long-term, large-scale and require vision, creativity, innovation, advanced analytical and inductive thinking
Translate advanced technology experience, an in-depth knowledge of the organizations tactical and strategic business objectives, the enterprise technological environment, the organization structure, and strategic technological opportunities and requirements into technical engineering solutions
Provide vision, direction and expertise to leadership on implementing innovative and significant business solutions
Maintain knowledge of industry best practices and new technologies and recommends innovations that enhance operations or provide a competitive advantage to the organization
Strategically engage with all levels of professionals and managers across the enterprise and serve as an expert advisor to leadership
Research, design, develop, and productionize machine learning models for fraud detection (supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised), anomaly detection, behavioral biometrics, network intrusion detection, account takeover prevention, and synthetic identity fraud
Build and maintain real-time and near-real-time scoring pipelines that deliver sub-second fraud/attack predictions during payment authorization, login, and high-risk interactions
Perform advanced feature engineering on complex, heterogeneous data sources (transactional, temporal, graph-based, textual threat intel, device & behavioral signals) to create high-signal features for model training and inference
Apply techniques such as graph neural networks, sequence modeling (LSTM/Transformer), ensemble methods, autoencoders, isolation forests, contrastive learning, and adversarial robustness to address evolving fraud and cyber threats
Conduct rigorous model evaluation, explainability analysis (SHAP, LIME, counterfactuals), bias/fairness checks, and performance monitoring in production environments
Partner closely with data engineers to define requirements for feature stores, real-time feature pipelines, and model-serving infrastructure
Collaborate with fraud investigators, threat hunters, SOC analysts, AML teams, and product owners to translate business problems into modeling objectives and iteratively improve detection effectiveness while minimizing false positives
Contribute to model risk management processes, model documentation, validation, and regulatory reporting (SR 11-7 / OCC guidelines, model risk frameworks)
Stay current with state-of-the-art research in adversarial ML, fraud/cybersecurity analytics, federated learning, privacy-preserving ML, and explainable AI in high-stakes domains
Participate in model experimentation sprints, A/B testing of detection strategies, and red-team exercises simulating sophisticated attacks
Qualification
Required
7+ years of Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education
Strong proficiency in Python (pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM/CatBoost, PyTorch/TensorFlow, PySpark) and experience with ML experimentation frameworks (MLflow, Weights & Biases, etc.)
Deep understanding of supervised & unsupervised learning, imbalanced classification, anomaly/outlier detection, time-series analysis, and ensemble techniques
Hands-on experience deploying models into real-time production environments (e.g., via APIs, Kafka consumers, Spark Streaming, or low-latency serving platforms)
Solid SQL skills and comfort working with large-scale data warehouses/lakehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery)
Proven track record of delivering measurable business impact (e.g., fraud loss reduction, false-positive rate improvement, detection rate lift) in regulated environments
Preferred
Experience with graph-based modeling (GraphSAGE, GNNs, link prediction) for fraud rings, money laundering networks, or lateral movement detection
Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Statistics, Machine Learning, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, or related quantitative discipline (or equivalent demonstrated experience)
Familiarity with adversarial ML, model robustness, concept drift detection, and active learning in security contexts
Background in privacy-preserving techniques (differential privacy, federated learning, secure multi-party computation) or synthetic data generation for security use cases
Exposure to financial crime domains: card-present/card-not-present fraud, ACH/wire fraud, mule accounts, trade-based money laundering, BEC, ransomware payments
Knowledge of financial regulatory model risk frameworks and experience with model validation/documentation
Publications, Kaggle rankings, or contributions to open-source ML/security projects are a plus
Benefits
Health benefits
401(k) Plan
Paid time off
Disability benefits
Life insurance, critical illness insurance, and accident insurance
Parental leave
Critical caregiving leave
Discounts and savings
Commuter benefits
Tuition reimbursement
Scholarships for dependent children
Adoption reimbursement
Company
Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo & Company is a financial services firm that provides banking, insurance, investments, and mortgage services.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Wells Fargo has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2022 (1)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
unknown1978-10-06IPO
Leadership Team
Charlie Scharf
CEO
Fernando Rivas
CEO of Corporate & Investment Banking
Recent News
2026-01-24
2026-01-23
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