Data Scientist at Prodigy Finance

Job description

Why this is an amazing opportunity?

This role is perfect for an experienced Data Scientist who wants to supercharge their career by experiencing first-hand what it is like to be part of an energetic, extremely fast growing company. You will be part of a focused team that goes out into the rest of the business looking for opportunities to study and measure its core business operations, learning how to make them better and putting in place infrastructure to support ongoing measurement and learning.

The sense of impact and reward will be huge. You will help to build a product which makes a very real difference in the world. Be a part of delivering socially responsible financial services to the masses; make it possible for students from more than 100 countries to obtain the finance to fulfil their dream of studying at the world’s top universities and schools.

We are a small non-hierarchical team; this means that you are going to get exposure to all aspects of our business immediately. You’ll gain as much accountability as you can handle and have an influence on scaling the company.

Our team is very international and very sociable; you will interact with the broader business on a regular basis. The position will be based in Cape Town.

One of our goals is to build one of the top FinTech teams and cultures anywhere in the world. This means putting a lot of time into ensuring we only hire people with exceptional potential, and creating the best working environment possible. If you want to work somewhere where you're learning from some of the best brains in Fintech, this would be a good fit.

Why join Prodigy Finance

• Be a part of a pioneering global growth company
• Experience the excitement and learn from being part of an incredibly fast-growing young company. No kidding - exponential growth. Happening right now
• Be pivotal in scaling the business by identifying smart solutions and partners with tech at the heart of it
• Enjoy the agility and flexibility offered by a startup culture. A sociable, relaxed and friendly work environment (with a serious coffee culture where you can wear shorts to work)
• We will help you make your mark. Make a real impact on the business and experience a steep learning curve with huge opportunities to grow and develop
• Gain an inside perspective on the functioning of a venture-backed Fintech startup, backed by top VCs, learn day-to-day management and build functional expertise
• Build a platform that helps to make a very real difference in the world

What you will do in the role

As a Data Scientist you will work as part of our technology team alongside talented software engineers to build measurement and learning into the broader business products, processes and systems. You will interact with people from all other teams and levels of seniority within Prodigy Finance as you go about your daily work.



Specific responsibilities will be to:

• Collaborate with Product Owners, Software Engineers and Functional Experts to improve the impact of our products, systems and processes using data derived from the teams data science and machine learning activities
• Look for relevant sources of data (both internally and externally) to the business to enrich data input to analysis and machine learning pipelines
• Build automated measurement, learning and analysis pipelines for business products, systems and processes
• Build automated visualizations to communicate our data in an easy to consume format.
• Educate product owners, software engineers and operations managers about the methods used by the data science team so that they can contribute to data-based learning within the business
• Document and explain the results of the data science team's work to others so that they can continue to apply and use these results in their daily work

What you need to be great at

• Analytical thinking capability; be logical, systematic, strategic and pragmatic
• Technical competence; love coding and look to continuously improve and find better ways of doing things
• Strong attention to detail, both quantitative and qualitative, can organize large amounts of data from disparate sources
• Able to learn new concepts and business issues quickly
• Mindfulness; be considerate of the implications of your work, really care about what you are doing and the impact of your contribution
• Problem-solving aptitude -- able to research complex open-ended problems and prepare solutions that address them and are backed by data and solid theoretical models
• Ability to explain complex concepts to others with patience and humility
• Biased towards action -- generate ideas, experiment with them, test them, learn from them, improve them, implement them, automate them
• Collaborate well with colleagues of all levels of seniority
• Excellent critical judgment; able to make good decisions, be trusted, respected and dependable, be proactive and responsive, ask the right questions, raise flags at the right time
• Be accountable for the team’s outputs and targets
• Be able to multi-task and work in a high pressured environment
• Ability to educate and train team members to ensure they are aware of the methods used by the team
• Who we are looking for; track record must haves
• Experience with one or more classic data science and machine learning algorithms and techniques (e.g. natural language processing, text mining, linear regression, classification, clustering, topic modelling, support vector machines)
• A strong background in software development with Python and relevant Python libraries (e.g. Numpy, SciPy, scikit-learn, Pandas)
• A tertiary education that includes statistical methods and machine learning
• Experience working with relational databases
• Experience with using and deploying "big data" processing tools (e.g. Storm, Spark, Hadoop, MapReduce, Riak)
• Experience that would be nice to have (but we’ll trade off if everything else fits)
• Ideally you will have an MSc or PhD that incorporated statistical methods or machine learning
• A publication or publications on a machine learning topic in a reputable journal
• Experience with recurrent neural networks or deep learning
• Experience with d3 or other visualization tools
• Experience with other programming languages, especially Ruby and Javascript
• Experience with Bayesian statistics
• Start-up experience. Sometimes the earth moves beneath your feet at Prodigy Finance so you've got to be comfortable with ambiguity, able to wear lots of hats, and adapt easily as we continue to grow
• The Prodigy Finance fit; attributes which run true in everyone at Team Prodigy

To be an A player at Prodigy Finance, you need to possess – in spades - the following attributes:

• Innovative + Smart
• Be curious enough to want to know more, think out the box, maybe even break the box, show initiative and be smart about it to find implementable, impactful solutions.
• International + Accountable
• Push yourself to be better every day. Work with others across the world, be resilient, add value and then hold yourself accountable. Encourage and celebrate each other.
• Energetic + Fun
• Sense of humour = survival. Bring energy and fun. Wear your heart on your sleeve. Work hard and find the time to play. We’re in this together.