Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Paynada is an established independent sales organization in the credit-card-processing and merchant-services industry. The AI Data Analyst - Merchant Acquisition will lead the development of a proprietary AI-driven merchant lead-intelligence platform, analyzing sales conversations and external business data to build and validate lead-scoring models. The role will also oversee experimentation, platform development, data governance, and integration with sales workflows.
Responsibilities
- Develop the overall research, data and AI strategy for a proprietary merchant lead-intelligence platform
- Analyze recorded sales conversations using transcription, natural-language processing, large language models and human-reviewed qualitative research
- Create a structured framework for extracting relevant information from calls, including merchant characteristics, processing concerns, switching triggers, objections, urgency, decision-maker engagement and sales outcomes
- Interview sales representatives and company leadership to capture domain knowledge that may not appear in existing structured data
- Design reliable labeling and quality-control procedures for call transcripts and sales outcomes
- Identify the signals most likely to predict meaningful sales progression, including statement submissions, follow-up meetings, proposals and signed merchant accounts
- Develop an initial transparent, rules-based scoring model suitable for use while labeled data remains limited
- Progressively develop statistical and machine-learning models as sufficient prospective data becomes available
- Identify and evaluate external data sources that could reveal merchant size, growth, industry, number of locations, technology, ownership changes, hiring activity and other relevant characteristics
- Connect internal conversation insights to externally observable business signals that can be used to identify new prospects
- Design controlled sales experiments comparing AI-selected leads with leads selected through our existing process
- Establish appropriate performance metrics, including conversion lift, precision among top-ranked leads, customer-acquisition cost and expected merchant profitability
- Work with sales leadership to integrate lead recommendations into the company’s existing workflow
- Build or manage the development of an initial working prototype and subsequent production platform
- Develop appropriate documentation, data-governance practices and safeguards for sensitive sales and merchant information
- Help evaluate and recruit additional data, engineering or research talent as the project grows
- Communicate findings and recommendations clearly to business leadership and nontechnical sales personnel
Skills
- Advanced training or equivalent professional experience in data science, applied statistics, machine learning, computer science, econometrics, quantitative marketing or a closely related field
- Demonstrated experience with predictive modeling, propensity modeling, lead scoring, customer analytics or another classification/ranking problem
- Strong Python and SQL capabilities
- Experience working with unstructured text, call transcripts, conversation analytics or natural-language processing
- Familiarity with large language models and their use in structured information extraction, classification and research workflows
- Ability to work effectively with limited historical data and develop a disciplined data-collection and validation plan
- Understanding of experimental design, prospective validation, model evaluation and common problems such as data leakage, overfitting and selection bias
- Ability to combine qualitative business research with quantitative analysis
- Strong product judgment and an interest in building a commercial platform, not merely producing an academic model or research report
- Ability to work independently, define priorities and communicate directly with company leadership
- High standards for confidentiality, security and responsible handling of recorded conversations and merchant information
- Experience in merchant acquiring, credit-card processing, payments, fintech, banking or financial services
- Experience analyzing B2B sales calls or developing sales-intelligence, revenue-operations or customer-acquisition systems
- Familiarity with merchant categories, processing statements, pricing structures, interchange, chargebacks, point-of-sale systems and the reasons merchants change processors
- Experience with speech-to-text systems, embeddings, retrieval systems and LLM evaluation
- Experience combining internal company data with licensed or publicly available external business data
- Experience taking a data product from initial research through deployment and ongoing monitoring
- Previous startup, founding-team or entrepreneurial experience
- Experience managing technical contributors or outside development resources
Benefits
- Meaningful equity participation
- Full benefits package
- Work remotely with substantial autonomy
Company Overview