Senior Data Scientist at Blue Label Telecoms

JOB PURPOSE:

Responsible for delivering solutions to business with insight from understanding needs and analysing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data. This role is intended to help shape strategies, guide decision making and provide solutions that meet specific business needs and goals.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Strategy and Continuous Improvement

• Staying up to date with, and where appropriate driving, influencing and facilitating adoption the best in class technologies and techniques for statistical analysis, modelling and decisioning across the team and broader business and in relation to projects that may be underway.
• Leading the roll-out of Big Data capabilities, consumer initiatives, analytics frameworks, decisioning solutions and best practices within the business
• Researching, designing, implementing, and deploying full-stack scalable data analytics and machine learning solutions to resolve various business issues.
• Builds and maintains a large-scale analytics infrastructure to be used across the business
• Consistently conducts research, design, implementation, and validation of cutting-edge algorithms to analyse extensive data sources that are available and build solutions which enable desired business outcomes on diverse fronts.
• Architects and implements data management systems of analytic frameworks for the business’s data
• Support BluNova’s Management in formulating new, creative and effective ways of leveraging the business’s vast data store and capabilities set to both resolve existing business solutions and develop new business opportunities.
• Develops, implements and maintains state-of-the-art algorithms for object detection, segmentation, classification, and recognition.
• Ensures all team members are mentored and upskilled in line with all developments made in the Data Science space to enable a chain of continuous capability development through the team, and seamless handover of capabilities between team members as and when required.

Data Gathering

• Motivate for and support sourcing of new data and/or features of data that may be required to deliver against requests or requirements that may be presented.
• Work with stakeholders throughout the organisation to identify opportunities for sourcing company data which may facilitate solutions delivery.
• Assess the effectiveness and accuracy of new data sources and data gathering techniques and ensure that they are appropriately integrated with data pipelines, data structures and features produces.
• Ensure that new data sourced or implemented in the environment does not negatively impact on existing data products, and if there are changes, that those are appropriately managed through the environment
• Understand the breadth of BluNova’s data sets and engage in interactive data exploration and data-driven story-telling
• Ensure that informative datasets are appropriately served for analytics and BI applications inside and outside of BluNova as required.

Data Modelling

• Mentorship of this capability within the BluNova team, both toward developing the skill set and toward deploying the skill set within context of capabilities of fit for purpose applications within the context of the team, needs or solutions being developed both at that time and into the future.
• Develop custom data models and algorithms that enables delivery of solutions, and which are best fit for purpose within the context of the solution.
• Collaborate with data engineer(s) and/or software developer(s) to scope, monitor and maintain the analytics environment to, enable data modelling, exploration, mining at scale and productionisation thereof.
• Architect data structures and feature sets that (1) facilitate diverse and detailed analysis (2) enable large scale processing and (3) manage data sensitivity.
• Prepare data sets for business intelligence and data mining which are fit for purpose.
• Version control data transformations.
• Script data transformations for data engineer to include in pipeline
• Use modelling to optimise solution development, decisioning and customer experience
• Develop processes and tools to monitor model performance and accuracy as data, applications and environments may change over time.

Data Science

• Work with stakeholders throughout the organisation to understand business models, value drivers, needs and context in order to identify opportunities for
• leveraging BluNova’s data to develop, communicate and deliver business solutions.
• Coaches and supports the BluNova team members and stakeholders to enable appropriate solution development, socialisation, buy-in and deployment
• Ongoing data exploration to identify opportunities, limitations and gaps in the data.
• Prepare analytical datasets to visualise value drivers against various metrics.
• Mine and analyse data from available data to drive optimisation and improvement of product development, deployment, consumer engagement and needs fulfillment and business strategies.
• Build machine learning / predictive models on analytical datasets to uplift value drivers.
• Cross-validate predictive models and transparently report on accuracy.
• Demonstrates the following scientist qualities: collaboration, clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance, fairness and ability to explain themselves to others, especially non-technical persons so that they may appreciate of understand the developments made.
• Provides ongoing tracking and monitoring of performance of decision systems and statistical models.
• Continuously improves methods and algorithms.
• Works transparently, ensures that all analysis is reproducible and uses version control appropriately for collaboration.
• Operates efficiently and cost-effectively within a cloud-based analytical and decisioning environment

Security and Compliance

• Works with the ISO to ensure that the information used adheres to the regulatory and security policies and agreements in place and provides motivation to improve upon these where possible.
• Qualifies where information can be stored or what information, external to the organisation, may be used in support of the use case.
• Collaborates with the ISO to ensure that the information used follows the compliance, access management, and control policies and that it meets the qualification and assurance requirements of the Group

Data Evangelism and Innovation

• Knowledge sharing and explanation within contexts and levels of detail that recipients may appreciate.
• Application brainstorming.
• Availability as a big data and analytics solution subject matter expert to the Blue Label Group.
• Promote data driven business approach.
• Participation in big data communities / open source

Stakeholder Management

• Presents and depicts the rationale of their findings in easy to understand terms for the business.
• Communicates and works with business subject matter experts.
• Educates the organisation both from IT and the business perspectives on new approaches, such as testing hypotheses and statistical validation of results.
• Helps the organisation understand the principles and the math behind the process to drive organisational buy-in and manage expectations.

Team Management

• Through effective inspirational leadership, facilitate the creation of accountable, full service teams who understand and strive to meet the needs of all stakeholders
• Coach, counsel and train BluNova team, operational managers and staff to apply, support, sustain and develop a Continuous Improvement culture.
• Role model behaviour and motivate team members in line with the BluNova’s values and ethos.
• Guidance of others and active development of self to improve on their technical and communication abilities so that BluNova’s capabilities and deliveries are better understood and thus trusted and applied through the business.

Self-Management

• Ensure that personal quality and productivity standards are consistently and accurately maintained.
• Demonstrate consistent application of internal procedures.
• Plan and prioritise, demonstrating abilities to manage competing demands.
• Demonstrate abilities to anticipate and manage change.
• Demonstrate flexibility in balancing achievement of own objectives with abilities to understand and respond to organisational and team needs.

EDUCATION

• STEM Postgraduate Qualification (Qualification is analytics, mathematics, statistics, engineering, physics, actuarial science and/or computer sciences preferred).

EXPERIENCE

• Minimum of 5 years’ experience in similar role.
• Python and/or R.
• Comfortable in a *nix & terminal environment.
• Capable in cloud-based environments