Specialist Data Scientist

With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

Leverage deep data science expertise in advanced statistics, data wrangling, data mining, data analysis, feature engineering, predictive modeling, storytelling, distributed computing, data visualization, machine learning tools, and data intuition to define, build, operationalize, and continuously improve data solutions that deliver relevant, quality assured, accurate, and commercially impactful data to the business.

Job Description

Data Science
• Participate in design thinking processes to determine and confirm hypotheses and priority questions/data challenges and related metrics to be solved for.
• Translate business questions to be solved into data requirements and define a data solution to deliver against these requirements.
• Proactively partner with the data engineering team to refine the data requirements and deliver raw data to Data Science teams for interpretation and analysis.
• Design fit for purpose data interpretation and analysis approaches and create customized data models, algorithms, machine learning tools, and recommendation engines to achieve the desired business outcomes.
• Use advanced data science skills to mine and interpret data, including but not limited to: advanced statistics, data wrangling, data mining, data analysis, feature engineering, predictive modeling, distributed computing, machine learning tools, and data intuition.
• Analyse and interpret complex data sets.
• Apply quality assurance frameworks to test model and analysis techniques (e.g., algorithms, models) and overall data quality.
• Apply the testing frameworks to monitor and analyse model performance and data integrity on all data assignments.
• Produce business insights and recommendations based on data analysis and modeling, with knowledge and experience of Java, Scala, Python, Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Kafka.
• Use storytelling and data visualization techniques to maximize impact and deliver a user-friendly product to business.
• Contribute to the consolidation of data solutions into viable end products (in the language of business) that can be leveraged on an ongoing basis (e.g., dashboards, reports).
• Present data analysis (trends, insights, forecasts) and findings to business and show tangible business impact to be derived from the data science process.
• Facilitate peer reviews and feedback on data solutions.
• Refine data analysis based on business and peer reviews.
• Contribute to the assessments of the effectiveness and accuracy of new data sources and data gathering techniques.
• Promote data literacy with business stakeholders by sharing best practices and showing tangible business impact and recommendations as a direct result of the data solutions provided.
• Stay ahead of the curve on data science trends and leading practice data science tools and techniques and transition the organization to advanced methods for the continuous optimization of data.

Accountability: Risk & Governance
• Identify data risks and mitigate these (pre, during, and post solution deployment/data delivery).
• Create business cases and solution specifications for various governance processes (if required).
• Apply data quality assurance frameworks and tools to guarantee data quality and data integrity (always) for specific data solutions.
• Contribute to risk, governance, compliance, and broader regulatory processes as a data science expert (if and when required).

Accountability: People
• Coach and mentor other data scientists.
• Conduct peer reviews, testing, and problem solving within and across the broader team.

Education

Bachelor's Degree: Information Technology.

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised.