Lead Data Scientist at Impact

Why this role is exciting:

At impact.com, we have an amazing opportunity to leverage machine learning and AI to drive product innovation. 

• You will work on our core and business products to help shape the future of what we build at Impact.  You will enjoy working with our rich data set, cutting edge technology, and the ability to see your insights turned into real products on a regular basis.  Partnering with internal and external stakeholders, you will develop new products/features and solve business problems by preparing, analyzing, and understanding data to prototype products/features, deliver insight, predict emerging trends, and provide recommendations to optimize results.
• Leaders in Data Science can see different angles of a product or business opportunity, and you know how to connect the dots and interact with people in various roles and functions. You have substantial experience with analytical tools and techniques, and bring a solid skill-set in analyzing data and communicating recommendations. You will deepen your skill-set by working with analytical thought leaders across the company.
• With your leadership and professional expertise, you manage a team of data scientists and analysts, plan project goals and lead the overall strategy for your group. You are a recognized authority in your functional area and develop, organize and launch projects that span engineering and analysis.

This position will be based in Cape Town 

What You'll Be Doing:

• Lead project teams focusing on ML product development and product analytics.  Interact cross-functionally with a wide variety of leaders and teams, and work closely with Engineers and Product Managers to identify opportunities for design and to assess improvements for products.
• Oversee machine learning product development projects with hands-on involvement. Build, review, deploy, scale, and enhance operationalized machine learning models and algorithms, including but not limited to Recommender System, NLP, graph neural networks, and time series modeling.  
• Collaborate with stakeholders, understand business questions, and formulate quantitative analysis that informs data driven decisions. Build data products (data sets, analysis, models etc.) and tools to drive hypothesis generation and decision making in partnership with engineering and product management teams. Create actionable metrics and design effective experiments. 
• Influence functional teams and develop best practices across the organization.  
• Communicate and visualize insights to multiple levels of stakeholders with clarity, informing decision-making. Design and create interactive visualization dashboard to facilitate custom analytics, trouble-shooting, data storytelling, and evangelization of ML products to non-technical audiences.
• Contribute to Data Science COE knowledge sharing and documentation.  Provide mentorship to junior team members. 
• Participate in recruitment and the interview process to grow the team.  Onboard and mentor junior team members to help them develop required skills and knowledge to be successful on the team.  

Does This Sound Like you?

• Master’s Degree in Statistics, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics/Data Science, Physics, Operations Research, Economics or other quantitative Social Science fields.  PhD preferred. 
• 7-10 years’ of tech industry work experience as a data scientist, statistician, or machine learning engineer. 
• Expert knowledge of advanced statistical modeling, machine learning, and experimentation or causal inference methods.  
• Well versed in Python, SQL, Spark and big data query language.
• Extensive knowledge, application, and experience in creating and implementing recommendation systems, machine learning, NLP, statistics, and deep learning
• Proficient with ML model deployment at scale.  Experience with automating feedback loops for algorithms/models in production and creating repeatable processes and scalable data products
• Ability to quantify improvements from business efficiency or customer experience based on research outcomes
• Experience forming partnerships and influencing cross-functional leaders in engineering, product, design, or research
• Ability to navigate complex business organizations and manage multiple cross-functional stakeholders.  Experience in leading large projects is preferred.
• Demonstrated le