Research Scientist - Financial Inclusion at Scale at M-KOPA

The Opportunity

• Mission-driven research: Every model you develop helps expand financial inclusion for under-banked populations
• Immediate impact: See your work improve lives in real-time, not just citations
• Global recognition: Join a company named by TIME100 as one of the world's most influential and by the Financial Times as Africa's fastest-growing for 4 consecutive years (2022-2025)
• Research freedom: Publish, attend conferences, and collaborate with academic institutions while solving meaningful problems
• Environmental impact: We're carbon-negative, having displaced over 2 million tonnes of emissions

What You'll Do

• Build generative AI models (VAEs, GANs, diffusion models) for financial inclusion across Africa
• Prototype and iterate advanced models, from credit risk assessment to customer behaviour modeling
• Publish research at top conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI etc) while solving real-world problems
• Work with teams across Africa and Europe to deploy Machine Learning solutions that expand financial access

What You Need

• Hands-on experience or Academic Publication in generative models (VAEs, GANs, diffusion models, or related methods)
• Advanced expertise in mathematics, statistics, and theoretical computer science
• Experience with deep learning, reinforcement learning, or specialised Machine Learning domains
• Experience with structured or unstructured data
• Proven ability to translate research into scalable algorithms
• Ideally a publication record in Machine Learning research (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI etc preferred)