M-Pesa Africa: Principal Data Scientist at Vodafone Global Enterprise

Role Purpose:

• The Commercial Team works with the M-Pesa leadership across our 7 OpCos to co-create the product strategy, drive thought leadership and new strategic partnerships, design new products and features, set commercial priorities with the engineering teams and support the product development lifecycle.
• Your responsibilities will include championing big data, analytics and machine learning to help build the next generation of M-Pesa services that are personalised, contextualised and smart.
• This could include work across the M-Pesa Africa product suite, including the consumer and merchant app experience, the financial services portfolio, international remittances and the business portal.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Create Machine Learning and AI products that provide actionable business insight and drive personalisation for M-Pesa users.
• Developing predictive models with large and varied datasets, working with a community of colleagues across Advanced Analytics, technology, and data and customer functions
• Development of machine learning models for various areas of the business on the Big Data Platform
• Development of prototype code in e.g. PySpark for automated training and scoring of the machine learning models
• Machine Learning Model performance tracking and reporting
• Uses data visualisation to engage audience in a compelling way, enabling effective storytelling
• Work with lead data scientist to deliver key packages of work to meet the needs of business customers
• Works in partnership with Big Data Engineering for data ingestion to support use cases
• Works in partnership with Big Data Production Data Engineering for model automation and productionising
• Contributing to the wider community to enable Machine Learning and AI capability across Vodafone globally.
• Manages and takes ownership of a portfolio of work from model development to stakeholder engagement

The ideal candidate for this role will have:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in quantitative fields like Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, Computer Science Engineering, Artificial Intelligence or related fields (essential)
• Professional and/or academic experience in Big Data analytics & deployment of models and algorithms to solve real-world problems (with deep statistical and machine learning modelling expertise)
• Familiarity with visualisation tools (e.g. Tableau, Qlik, D3)
• Experience working with large datasets (e.g. SQL, Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL)
• Proficiency in at least one relevant programming language: Python, R
• Experience in major machine learning modelling libraries (e.g., H2O, scikit-learn, PyTorch) and techniques (e.g. random forest, gradient boosting, k-means segmentation, multiple regression, factor analysis, time-series forecasting)

Core competencies, knowledge and experience:

• A minimum of 6-8 years relevant experience in Data Science.
• Experiencing mentoring and managing a team of junior data scientists.
• Experience manipulating and analysing large and complex datasets  
• Experience in visualisation, creating graphical static and interactive displays of data that clearly communicate insight
• Good interpersonal communication and presentation skills
• Understands how AI & ML creates commercial value
• Ability to manage relationships with stakeholders across the continent
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment 
• Analytical and expansive thinking with a strong desire to deliver and develop
• Experience building and deploying models (Churn, Recommenders, Credit, Fraud, etc.)

Closing date for Applications: 13 June 2026.