Data Scientist and Engineer at GVA Partners

Job Summary
Are you passionate about delivering innovative solutions? Do you want to help build the next generation of financial services solutions that will impact millions of lives in Africa and beyond? Would you want to arm decision makers and business leaders with facts and insights to make more poignant and competitive decisions rather than using just intuition and experiences?

Together we will make an impact on real people, helping them maximise their financial opportunities and access the best in class financial services at their convenience, anytime, anywhere via their preferred means - be it in the analogue or digital world - and become most productive and successful in managing their money efficiently.

We are looking for Data Scientists and Data Engineers, with proven capability of using data to tackle high impact business problems and deliver highly competitive customer outcomes. In this role, you will help shape and strengthen our team’s technical and business strategy. And deliver on some of our key strategic initiatives. You will have the opportunity to experiment with data and push the boundaries of how much value we can create for our customers.

Our team develop financial services applications that will drive efficient distribution and access to financial services by our customers and relevant internal business development teams, which will be used across different devices. You will be working to figure out how to apply Data Science to develop innovative products and aid a broad range of decision making.

If you love data, if you love to work on projects where you can be part of defining the direction and architect new solutions to make an impact, if you want to take on some exciting challenges, if you get excited when using your data scientist skills to find and solve problems, provide fact based insights and correlations to address operational and strategic business challenges and are highly numerate and conscientious, this job might be for you and we can give you access to the job of your dreams.

We aspire to create without boundaries and to lead by doing. We don’t just produce innovative financial services and products, we develop amazing people and unleash their talents and careers too. It’s in our DNA to push forward, to create a better future, exploit technology in making our business highly competitive, to never rest and find new ways to assist our clients to access financial services efficiently and successfully than our competitors. We are a driven and highly focused team. And more importantly, we enjoy collaboration and helping each other to succeed. We believe in offering our customers the best in class financial services solutions and how mantra says it all – >>>Speed>>> Service>>>Security>>>.

Key Responsibilities

• Understand the required business drivers and applications that require data insights
• Oversee activities of team members to ensure proper execution of duties and alignment with the Bank’s overall vision
• Provide innovation leadership within the Bank, thereby creating additional value through the utilization of its data assets and analytics
• Develop the Bank’s data science capabilities
• Build predictive models and products, and conduct experiments to gain insights into quality, product viability, targeted user base adoption potential and customer usage
• Cross-collaborate with architects, scientists and engineers on building statistical models, applying machine learning techniques for targeted solutions and effectively communicating the analysis and findings through interactive visualizations, documents and presentations to appropriate business and technical teams
• Analyse and study data to provide relevant insights on the product design, adoption and quality
• Identify opportunities to make a commercial difference and lead the development of analytics initiatives to meet business requirements, taking account of user needs and technology and operational landscape
• Document business requirements, use cases and test scenarios. Participate in ensuring quality end user testing and acceptance
• Design and engineer experiments on end to end scenarios and use cases
• Explore different directions based on data and be able to quickly change direction based on the analysis
• Identify new analytics trends and opportunities to drive the innovation agenda across business functions & Big Data Analytics community
• Support the prioritisation of both internal and external data assets and work with technology and business lines in setting key requirements for data sourcing
• Engage with stakeholders across the business to advise and provide solutions and communicate clearly to colleagues the value of Big Data
• Enjoy discovering and solving problems; being a self-starter who takes responsibility when required
• Proactively work with business executives and various departmental heads across the business in order to provide advance analytic data modelling systems
• Be a subject matter expert and thought leader in the Bank and wider industry
• Strong interpersonal, oral and written communication and presentation skills, with ability to communicate complex findings in a simple manner

Basic Qualifications

• 5 years’ software development experience within financial services, telecoms or other organisations with vast data analytics deployment (for Data Engineering (DE) roles)
• 3 years’ experience with statistical models OR machine learning methods (for Data Scientist (DS) roles)
• Strong Bachelor's Degree

Preferred Qualifications

• M.Sc or PhD in a field like Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Machine Learning, Operations Research, Data Mining, Information Systems, AI or related fields
• Experience with Windows platform development in SQL, C++ and C# is a big plus
• Proficient in statistical packages and ML libraries (e.g. R, Python SciPy and NLTK, Spark MLlib, SAS) (DS)
• Strong knowledge of Big Data technology (e.g. Hadoop MR, interactive SQL on Hadoop, NoSQL, Spark, R, SAS, SciPy, Tableau, GIS) (DS)
• Familiar with leading visualisation tools (e.g. ggplot2, Pandas) (DS)
• Strong hands-on experience in machine learning (DS)
• Experience on banking systems such as Flexcube and Finacle
• Deep familiarity with statistical models & and machine learning methods (DS)
• Experience in Big Data analytics & deployment of models and algorithms from large volumes of structured and/or unstructured data in a commercial /consumer environment
• Ability to test hypotheses from raw data sets, draw meaningful conclusions, and effectively communicate results verbally, in writing, and through effective visualization
• Familiar with implementing data transformations and algorithms in common programming languages
• Ability to work in cross functional teams to translate business issues into potential analytics solutions
• Comfortable communicating progress and outcomes to business stakeholders using relevant language
• Excellent communications & interpersonal skills. Ability to convince other strong personalities of their ideas and communicate complicated analysis & insights to non-technical audience.