Senior Data Scientist – Hybrid Contract – Johannesburg

About the role

A leading South African financial institution is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to join its high‑performing analytics team. The role focuses on building advanced machine‑learning and AI solutions that drive fraud detection, financial crime prevention, customer intelligence and strategic decision‑making.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and deploy advanced machine‑learning models for complex business problems.
• Build predictive and prescriptive analytics solutions using large enterprise datasets.
• Apply statistical modelling, feature‑engineering pipelines and graph analytics to uncover trends, anomalies and hidden relationships.
• Collaborate with data engineers, architects and software engineers to create scalable data pipelines.
• Monitor, optimise and continuously refine model performance in production.
• Present analytical findings to senior business stakeholders and contribute to AI/GenAI initiatives such as knowledge graphs and intelligent decisioning.

Required profile

• Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Data Science or a related quantitative field.
• 6+ years of commercial data‑science experience, including production‑grade machine‑learning deployments.
• Strong Python programming and advanced SQL skills.
• Experience with large structured and unstructured datasets and statistical modelling.

Required skills

• Python
• SQL
• Machine Learning
• Predictive Modelling
• Feature Engineering
• Data Visualisation
• Statistical Analysis
• Model Evaluation
• Git
• Spark or PySpark
• Graph Analytics
• Graph Databases (e.g., Neo4j)
• Knowledge Graphs
• Generative AI
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• LangChain
• Databricks
• MLflow
• Azure Machine Learning
• AWS SageMaker
• Docker
• Kubernetes