Data Scientist jobs in South Africa

At Lyft, our purpose is to serve and connect. We aim to achieve this by cultivating a work environment where all team members belong and have the opportunity to thrive.

Lyft Ads is one of Lyft’s newest and fastest-growing businesses, focused on building the world’s largest transportation media network. Our mission is to help brands reach riders during key moments of their journey—before, during, and after a ride—by delivering meaningful, contextually relevant ad experiences. We operate at the intersection of mobility data, real-time decision systems, and AI-powered personalization, enabling advertisers to run high-impact campaigns with measurable outcomes.

We are seeking a Algorithms Data Scientist to help build the next generation of ads relevance, targeting, optimization, and measurement algorithms that power the Lyft Ads platform. In this role, you will work across large-scale datasets and complex real-time systems to design, prototype, and deploy production-grade machine learning models. You’ll collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, Data Science, and Sales to translate ambiguous business and advertiser needs into rigorous algorithmic solutions that improve ad performance, enhance marketplace efficiency, and drive meaningful revenue growth.

This is a high-impact, highly technical role within a rapidly scaling business line. The ideal candidate brings strong applied machine learning intuition, hands-on modeling experience, and the ability to write clean, efficient production code. You will play a critical role in shaping how advertisers connect with Lyft riders—pushing the boundaries of personalization, measurement, and real-time optimization in a dynamic marketplace.

• Design, develop, and deploy production-grade machine learning models and algorithms that power core Lyft Ads capabilities, such as ad relevance, targeting, ranking, bid optimization, pacing, campaign delivery, and measurement.
• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of modeling projects — including problem definition, data exploration, feature engineering, model development, offline evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
• Collaborate closely with Ads Engineering to integrate models into real-time ad-serving and batch decision systems, ensuring performance across latency, scalability, and reliability constraints.
• Analyze large-scale mobility, behavioral, and ads performance datasets to identify patterns, surface opportunities, and guide ML and AI driven product improvements.
• Implement rigorous model evaluation frameworks, including offline metrics, statistical tests, calibration, sensitivity analysis, and A/B experimentation to validate both model impact and system-level outcomes.
• Build robust training pipelines, feature transformations, and scoring infrastructure, ensuring reproducibility, observability, and long-term maintainability.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Sales to translate ambiguous advertiser goals (e.g., increased conversions, reach efficiency, brand lift) into measurable requirements and success metrics.
• Investigate and resolve model behavior issues, production regressions, calibration drift, and performance anomalies in close partnership with Ads Infra teams.
• Drive innovation by staying current with advances in ML for ranking, recommendation, causal inference, optimization, and ads measurement — and proactively identifying opportunities to apply them.
• Contribute to Lyft Ads’ modeling and experimentation infrastructure, through model cards, documentation, reproducibility standards, and code quality improvements.

• Master’s, or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Engineering, or related quantitative fields; or equivalent applied industry experience.
• 3–5 years of hands-on ML/applied science experience, ideally involving production models, large-scale systems, or ads/recommendation/relevance domains. Strong proficiency in Python and machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or scikit-learn; ability to write clean, efficient, production-adjacent code.
• Experience working with large-scale datasets and distributed data tools (Spark, Snowflake, Presto, Databricks).
• Practical experience building and evaluating:
  • Ranking and relevance models
  • Optimization or pacing algorithms
  • Predictive models for CTR, CVR, or user response
  • Causal or experimentation-based measurement methods
• Understanding of online/offline evaluation techniques, including:
  • Offline metrics (AUC, NDCG, MRR, calibration)
  • A/B testing methodologies
  • Bias correction and counterfactual estimation
• Ability to solve ambiguous problems by structuring analyses, evaluating trade-offs, and proposing algorithmic solutions grounded in scientific rigor.
• Strong communication skills, with an ability to model behavior, constraints, trade-offs, and recommendations to engineering, product, and sales partners.
• Demonstrated ownership of modeling work, including debugging, monitoring, documentation, and iteration after deployment.
• Curiosity, initiative, and a track record of delivering measurable improvements through high-quality modeling.

• Extended health and dental coverage options, along with life insurance and disability benefits
• Mental health benefits
• Family building benefits
• Child care and pet benefits
• Access to a Lyft funded Health Care Savings Account
• RRSP plan to help save for your future
• In addition to provincial observed holidays, salaried team members are covered under Lyft's flexible paid time off policy. The policy allows team members to take off as much time as they need (with manager approval). Hourly team members get 15 days paid time off, with an additional day for each year of service
• Lyft is proud to support new parents with 18 weeks of paid time off, designed as a top-up plan to complement provincial programs. Biological, adoptive, and foster parents are all eligible.
• Subsidized commuter benefits

Lyft is committed to creating an inclusive workforce that fosters belonging. Lyft believes that every person has a right to equal employment opportunities without discrimination because of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, pardoned record of offences, or any other basis protected by applicable law or by Company policy. Lyft also strives for a healthy and safe workplace and strictly prohibits harassment of any kind. Accommodation for persons with disabilities will be provided upon request in accordance with applicable law during the application and hiring process. Please contact your recruiter if you wish to make such a request.

Lyft highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. This role will be in-office on a hybrid schedule — Team Members will be expected to work in the office at least 3 days per week, including on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Lyft considers working in the office at least 3 days per week to be an essential function of this hybrid role. Your recruiter can share more information about the various in-office perks Lyft offers. Additionally, hybrid roles have the flexibility to work from anywhere for up to 4 weeks per year. #Hybrid

The expected base pay range for this position in the Toronto area is CAD 108,000 - CAD $135,000. Salary ranges are dependent on a variety of factors, including qualifications, experience and geographic location. Range is not inclusive of potential equity offering, bonus or benefits. Your recruiter can share more information about the salary range specific to your working location and other factors during the hiring process.