Senior Data Scientist Johannesburg | Hybrid | Contract Role | Well-Known Financial Institution

Introduction

A leading South African financial institution is looking for an experienced Senior Data Scientist to join a high-performing analytics team focused on solving complex business challenges through advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

This is an exciting opportunity to work on large-scale enterprise data, develop predictive models, and build innovative AI solutions that support fraud detection, financial crime prevention, customer intelligence, and strategic decision-making.

You'll work alongside data engineers, architects, software engineers, and business stakeholders to develop production-ready analytical solutions that have real business impact.

Duties & Responsibilities

What You'll Be Doing

• 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 and machine learning techniques to identify trends, anomalies and business opportunities.
• Develop customer intelligence, segmentation and behavioural models.
• Design feature engineering pipelines to support machine learning models.
• Apply graph analytics and network analysis techniques to identify hidden relationships and financial crime patterns.
• Contribute to AI and GenAI initiatives including Knowledge Graphs and intelligent decisioning.
• Partner with Data Engineers to build scalable data pipelines.
• Optimise model performance through continuous monitoring and refinement.
• Present analytical findings to senior business stakeholders.
• Collaborate within Agile delivery teams across Data, Technology and Business.

Desired Experience & Qualification

Minimum Requirements

• Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Data Science or a related quantitative field.
• 6+ years' commercial Data Science experience.
• Proven experience developing production machine learning models.
• Strong Python programming skills.
• Advanced SQL.
• Experience working with large structured and unstructured datasets.
• Strong statistical modelling experience.
• Experience deploying machine learning solutions into production.

Essential Technical Skills

• Python
• SQL
• Machine Learning
• Predictive Modelling
• Feature Engineering
• Data Visualisation
• Statistical Analysis
• Model Evaluation
• Git
• Spark or PySpark

Highly Advantageous

• Graph Analytics
• Graph Databases (Neo4j or similar)
• Knowledge Graphs
• Generative AI
• LLMs
• LangChain
• Databricks
• MLflow
• Azure Machine Learning
• AWS SageMaker
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Fraud Analytics
• Financial Crime Analytics
• Banking or Financial Services experience

What We Are Looking For

You'll thrive in this role if you enjoy solving complex problems using data, are passionate about emerging AI technologies, and can translate technical solutions into measurable business value. We're looking for someone who combines strong technical capability with commercial thinking and excellent stakeholder engagement.

Interested?

Why Apply?

• Work on enterprise-scale AI and Data Science initiatives.
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI, Machine Learning and Graph Analytics technologies.
• Collaborative, highly skilled technical teams.
• Long-term contract opportunity with a leading financial institution.
• Competitive market-related contract rate.