Data Scientist at Research ICT Africa

Research ICT Africa conducts research on digital policy and regulation that facilitates evidence-based policy making for improved access, use and application of ICT for sustainable development in Africa and in the Global South and we are looking for a data scientist to join our team! This is a great opportunity for an individual interested in creating a space for themselves with a dynamic and diverse team to play with the wealth of structured and unstructured real world, survey, prices, and internet measurements data to more effectively drive the public interest research to policy influence.

Key responsibilities of the job current envisaged are:

• Drive individual and team research outputs from conceptualisation to delivery (include data pre-processing/cleaning, data analysis/modelling, visualization, and presentation of findings).
• Identify valuable data sources and automate collection processes.
• Apply (or develop if necessary) tools to efficiently collect, clean, and prepare high volumes of data for analysis.
• Work closely with an interdisciplinary team on data analysis to assess digital policy outcomes.
• Visualise data for maximum impact.
• Publish and present research findings at local and international conferences and forums.
• Develop models to uncover insights from mashups of real-world big data, internet measurements, survey data, and prices data.
• Develop and improve existing company datasets and provide insight into leading analytic practices and designs
• Identify and prioritise actionable, high-impact insights across diverse projects and large data sets.
• Lead iterative learning and development circles internally to improve our overall data collection and application ability

Education/ Key Qualifications:

• Proven experience as data scientist/analyst
• Sc. in related field with 3+ years’ experience applying statistical and/or data mining techniques to real social and/or business problems, while meeting required technical skills.
• Experience in developing and deploying large-scale data science applications, data mining, portal development and data management.
• Understanding of cognitive analytics, data science, machine learning
• Experience in data visualisation tools and techniques or the management of outsourced implementation of them on data projects.

Preferred:

• Expertise in MySQL, DDL, DML, DCL for manipulating, control, and analysing data from large databases.
• Experience working with development toolsets such as Spark, Hadoop, Python, Java, Scala, Cloudera, Cassandra, Docker, Azure/AWS/Google Cloud, MYSQL, MongoDB, NOSQL
• Familiarity with SQL/NoSQL data sources and tools (R, MATLAB, Spark, SQL, NoSQL, Hadoop)
• Interdisciplinary/policy research experience an advantage.