Senior Specialist - Advanced Analytics Finance at MTN

Mission/ Core purpose of the Job:

• Responsible for modeling complex business problems and discovering insights through the use of statistical, mining, and visualization techniques. The Senior Specialist: Advanced Analytics contributes to building and developing the organization’s data analytics landscape and supports the senior leadership with insights, management reports, and analysis for decision-making processes.

Job Specifications/ Minimum & Preferred Requirements

• Education / Business Degree    
• Minimum of 3-year tertiary degree in IT, Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or related quantitative field
• Fluent in English

Work Experience    

• Minimum of 5 years’ experience in a data science and analytics environment, with experience in model development, interpretation, and deployment.
• Experience using statistics, scripting languages and machine learning to solve complex business problems.
• Experience with big data analysis tools and techniques.
• Practical experience and theoretical understanding of algorithms for classification, regression, clustering, and anomaly detection
• Management experience beneficial.
• Experience working in a medium to large organisation
• Worked across diverse cultures and geographies advantages

Training    

• Data science and advanced analytics.
• Data base modelling and data warehousing principles (SQL)
• Big data tools (Spark, Hive, etc)
• Strong Programming skills (R, SAS, Python, C++, Java, etc…)
• Computer software development
• Data Visualisation (Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau etc.)
• Solution automation
• Public GIT and Kaggle profiles a major plus

Industry / Certifications    Relevant certification / accreditation
Any other specifications    

• MS Office (Word, Excel, and Outlook)
• Understanding of the MTN framework or Telecommunications industry
• Worked across diverse cultures and geographies
• Knowledge of modern Big Data platforms and Open Source Solutions

Key Performance Areas    

Measures (KPIs for job)
Key Job Responsibilities     
Tactical Implementation

• Align all operational activities undertaken in the department to the organization’s strategic objectives.
• Drive best practice, iterative improvements, and innovation within Finance.
• Provide recommendations and insights to various business units and influence future decisions based on advanced analytics and ML models.
• As per business plan

Data Modelling

• Researches and implements cutting-edge techniques and tools in machine learning/AI to make data analysis more efficient.
• Design data science approach, applying tried-and-true techniques or developing custom algorithms as needed by the business problem.
• Lead multiple analytic project teams by serving as the senior technical thought leader; working with various business units to translate project goals into data analytics models.
• Build predictive and data mining models with high dimensional and dynamic data.
• Effectively communicate and interpret model results for business.
• As per business plan

Data Analysis

• Utilise big data analytics to analyse data and extract meaningful business insights.
• Model complex business problems and discover business insights using statistical, mining, and visualization techniques.
• Code, test and maintain analytical software tools.
• Investigate trends, identify behavior patterns, and anomalies in the data.
• Proactively mines data lake to identify DQ issues, trends and patterns and generates insights for business assurance streams.
• Perform analytical tasks such as text mining and sentiment analysis using Big Data techniques and algorithms.
• Analyse data from company databases to drive optimisation and improvement of MTN SA’s data quality and compliance.
• Develop processes to analyze unstructured information collected through social media platforms i.e. Wiki, SharePoint, Online, Twitter, FB etc.
• Communicate results of analysis to business partners/stakeholders and executives.
• As per business plan

Continuous Improvement

• Develop usage and access control policies and systems in collaboration with BICC.
• Partner with other data scientists and BI specialists in continuous improvement processes impacting data quality in the context of a specific use case.
• Recommend ongoing improvements to methods and algorithms that lead to findings, including new information.
• Engage with business teams to find opportunities, understand requirements, and translate those requirements into technical solutions.
• As per business plan

Collaboration / Coordination

• Collaborate with business assurance teams and various stakeholders throughout the organisation to identify opportunities for leveraging company data to drive business solutions.
• Collaborate with other functions across the business to ensure effectiveness of analysis conducted.
• Collaborate with other functions to drive and where applicable enhance the utilisation of models, algorithms and software that help solve business problems.
• Collaborate with data engineers and platform architects to implement robust and real-time solutions.
• As per business plan

Reporting

• Translate business needs into reporting requirements.
• Supports the senior leadership with management reports, and analysis for fact-based decision-making.
• Accountable for stakeholder & executive reporting.
• Track and report on model performance deployed in production.
• Prepare reports on operational performance and detailed reports on specific projects when required.
• Communicate to the business assurance functions the various predictions and findings through effective data visualizations and reports.
• As per business plan