Senior Data Scientist

About the role

Vodacom is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to design and deliver AI and intelligent automation solutions that enhance services for its customers and stakeholders. The role involves collaborating with advanced analytics, engineering, and business teams to build and operationalise machine-learning models on large-scale data platforms.

Key responsibilities

• Create AI/IA products and services for Vodacom and its partners.
• Develop advanced analytical models using large and varied datasets.
• Contribute to the global AI capability community within the organization.
• Build, train, and productionise machine-learning models on Big Data platforms.
• Track model performance, generate reports and visualisations for storytelling.
• Partner with Big Data Engineering to automate and integrate AI workloads.
• Collaborate with business decision-support teams to deliver insights.
• Present findings to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, Engineering, Artificial Intelligence or a related quantitative field.
• 3–5 years of relevant experience in Big Data and Data Science.
• Experience with recommendation systems and data manipulation using SQL, PySpark or NoSQL.
• Familiarity with GenAI and Large Language Models is a plus.

Required skills

• Programming: Python, R, Java.
• Data handling: SQL, PySpark, NoSQL databases.
• Machine-learning frameworks: scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch.
• Algorithms: random forest, gradient boosting, k-means clustering.
• Building and optimising recommendation systems.
• Experience with big-data platforms and model productionisation.