Senior Data Scientist at Pepkor Payments & Lending

Key Responsibilities

Information Gathering and Solution Design

• Identify opportunities in the business to solve business problems using data science solutions
• Identify the right problems to solve by analysing the viability of business request and ideas, in the predictive, prescriptive and cognitive analytics space
• Support business in the project definition stage by focusing on value creation
• Conceptualise the right solution to generate maximum value

Data Processing and Manipulation

• Find, clean and structure the data necessary for the solution in a SQL + Python environment
• Performance lead selection and support marketing with data requirements for marketing purposes
• Performance feature creation and performance outcome analysis
• Design and build feature stores to enable model development and deployment

Model Development and Validation

• Develop machine learning models for marketing and credit risk assessment across the credit life cycle
• Optimize models for accuracy, interpretability, and performance
• Document and present models to business stakeholders

Strategy Development

• Develop the decision strategy utilizing the model that will be implemented to improve the decision making
• Design champion/challenger strategies to evaluate model effectiveness and quantify business benefit

Deployment

• Work with Machine learning engineers,  IT, credit risk to deploy models and decision strategies

Monitoring and Maintenance

• Monitor model and strategy performance and improve as required
• Monitor campaign performance and find ways using data science techniques to improve and automate processes

Personal and Functional leadership

• Take ownership of own work by delivering high quality work on time.
• Show initiative and be pro-active in finding opportunities to improve data and / or processes
• Take on guidance related to career development and show initiative by continuously improving skills, knowledge and the application thereof in designing and implementing solutions.
• Mentor and train other team members and share knowledge

Qualifications and Experience

• Degree in information technology / mathematics / engineering / actuarial science or related discipline.
• 5+ years’ experience in a data science or decision science role building predictive models for credit risk assessment using machine learning and statistical techniques