Data Scientist (12‑month contract)

About the role

iqbusiness is looking for a Data Scientist on a 12‑month contract to work with an international partner from its Welgemoed office in Cape Town. The position is hybrid, with three days on‑site and two days remote, and is ideal for an early‑career professional eager to apply text‑analytics and statistical methods to research projects.

Key responsibilities

• Perform text analysis using NLP techniques such as preprocessing, tokenisation, topic modelling and entity extraction.
• Carry out statistical analyses, exploratory data analysis and data cleaning to support research objectives.
• Structure, clean and organise datasets to ensure reproducibility and high data quality.
• Develop small analytical prototypes and scripts, leveraging modern AI coding assistants.
• Contribute to internal dashboards using tools like Plotly Dash.
• Document workflows and communicate results to technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Collaborate with team members through Git version control and participate in scoping discussions.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Econometrics or a related field.
• At least 2 years of experience in a data‑focused role.
• Working knowledge of Python and common data‑science libraries.
• Familiarity with NLP workflows and hands‑on experience applying them.
• Basic statistical knowledge and experience with data exploration.
• Proficiency with Git for version control.
• Strong interest in AI and emerging LLM technologies.

Required skills

• Python, Pandas, NumPy, scikit‑learn, spaCy, NLTK.
• Git, Plotly Dash.
• LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic) and agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph).
• HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Azure, Docker, Linux.