Credit Risk Modelling Data Scientist📣 Job Ad

About Hala and the Opportunity

Hala is a leading fintech company in the MENAP region, dedicated to redefining financial services and building the future bank for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Licensed by the Saudi Arabian Central Bank, Hala empowers SMEs with cutting-edge financial and technological tools to start, run, and grow their businesses. Hala Financing is currently seeking a Credit Risk Modelling Data Scientist to join its Data team in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This is a full-time role focused on developing robust credit risk capabilities.

Role Purpose and Impact

The Credit Risk Modelling Data Scientist will play a pivotal role in supporting the development of Hala Financing’s credit engine, risk models, and portfolio monitoring capabilities. This position is central to predicting the probability of default, enhancing credit decisioning, and improving risk segmentation. The successful candidate will build data-driven models that support responsible growth in SME lending, combining expertise in actuarial thinking, credit risk modelling, machine learning, and strong business judgment. A minimum of 2-5 years of relevant experience is required for this role.

Key Responsibilities

• Build, validate, and improve models for probability of default, credit scoring, affordability, delinquency prediction, and customer risk segmentation.
• Analyze historical repayment behavior, first-payment failure, delinquency trends, vintage curves, and default patterns.
• Support the enhancement of Hala Financing’s credit engine by identifying stronger predictive variables and decision rules.
• Develop early-warning indicators to detect customers likely to delay, default, or underperform.
• Monitor portfolio performance across cohorts, channels, customer segments, loan products, tenure, ticket size, and repayment behavior.
• Build dashboards and analytical frameworks to track approval quality, disbursement performance, default rates, roll rates, collections performance, and portfolio risk.
• Run scenario analysis and stress testing to assess the impact of growth, pricing, approval policy, and macroeconomic changes on portfolio performance.
• Support management reporting for credit performance, investor reporting, and internal risk committees.
• Utilize statistical and machine learning techniques to improve credit decisioning and default prediction.
• Work with structured and alternative data sources, including transaction data, merchant behavior, repayment history, business activity, and external data where available.
• Design experiments and champion/challenger tests to evaluate credit policy changes.
• Partner with Data Engineering to improve data quality, feature availability, model monitoring, and automation.
• Collaborate with Credit, Risk, Product, Collections, Finance, and Business teams to translate business questions into analytical solutions.
• Provide clear recommendations on credit policy, approval rules, risk appetite, and portfolio growth.
• Help balance growth, profitability, and risk by turning data insights into practical business actions.

Required Skills and Expertise

The ideal candidate will possess a strong combination of analytical and technical skills, coupled with practical business acumen. Key areas of expertise include:

• Proficiency in actuarial thinking and methodologies.
• Demonstrated experience in credit risk modelling.
• Strong background in machine learning techniques and applications.
• Ability to apply strong business judgment to complex financial data.

Measures of Success

Performance in this role will be evaluated based on the following key outcomes:

• Improved accuracy of default prediction and credit risk segmentation.
• Reduced first-payment failure and early delinquency rates.
• Stronger credit engine decisioning and approval quality.
• Clear portfolio monitoring and effective early-warning indicators.
• Achieving a better balance between loan growth, risk, profitability, and capital efficiency.

Work Environment

This full-time position is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and involves working as part of the dedicated Data team within Hala Financing. The role requires close collaboration with various internal departments to achieve strategic objectives.