Data Science Lead: Hands-On AI & ML Leader

Morton Moore Financial Services; George; On-site; ZAR 837,000 - 949,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Player-coach leadership

Own AI initiatives

Shape AI strategy with leadership

Cloud-native data stack (Azure, Snow,

Job summary

Morton Moore Financial Services in George, Western Cape, South Africa, seeks an experienced Data Science Lead to build and drive its AI and ML capability on-site in George. The role blends hands-on modelling with team leadership in a young, ambitious data organisation, with strong governance and regulatory focus.

The successful candidate will mentor data scientists, shape the AI strategy with senior leadership, and own end-to-end model lifecycle from discovery to deployment, monitoring and

Qualifications

• Five+ years in data science or ML, incl. at least two years in senior/lead capacity.
• Proven track record delivering production ML models with measurable business impact.
• Strong Python and SQL skills with familiarity in modern data warehousing.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development and production deployment of ML models delivering business value.
• Own model lifecycle end to end from discovery to production monitoring and retraining.
• Run stakeholder discovery sessions to scope opportunities and define success metrics.
• Build and maintain supervised, unsupervised and time-series models across use cases.
• Partner with Data/Analytics Engineering to ensure robust data pipelines for model development.
• Set and enforce standards for model quality, validation, documentation and peer review.
• Implement MLOps and deployment pipelines on a cloud-native stack.
• Ensure governance, explainability and regulatory compliance (POPIA, FAIS, Treating Customers Fairly).
• Present outputs and insights to executive audiences in clear commercial language.
• Mentor data scientists via pairing, code reviews and coaching while hands-on.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data warehousing

Tools

Azure

GCP

AWS

Job description

Morton Moore Financial Services in George, Western Cape, South Africa, seeks an experienced Data Science Lead to build and drive its AI and ML capability on-site in George. The role blends hands-on modelling with team leadership in a young, ambitious data organisation, with strong governance and regulatory focus.

The successful candidate will mentor data scientists, shape the AI strategy with senior leadership, and own end-to-end model lifecycle from discovery to deployment, monitoring and