Meridian Credit Union

Data Scientist

Meridian Credit Union
Apr 2024 – Present

I work as a Data Scientist in a highly regulated financial environment, building machine learning and analytics solutions that directly support risk, compliance, and business decision making.

A large part of my role is translating abstract modeling ideas into systems that can safely operate in production. Models are not evaluated only on performance, but on explainability, auditability, and how well they integrate with existing processes. This means thinking beyond notebooks and treating every model as a long-lived system.

I collaborate closely with compliance, cybersecurity, and domain experts to document data sources, justify feature choices, and assess potential risks before anything moves forward. This process shapes both the technical design and the modeling approach, and has made me deliberate about tradeoffs between complexity, transparency, and reliability.

On the technical side, I design end-to-end workflows that cover data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, and deployment. I focus on building pipelines that are maintainable, reproducible, and easy to reason about by teams outside of data science.

This role has reinforced an important lesson for me. The best models are not just accurate. They are the ones stakeholders trust enough to actually use.