Data Science Lead — Hands-On AI Strategy & Growth

Morton Moore Pty Ltd; South Africa; On-site; ZAR 837,000 - 949,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Leadership opportunity

Growth pathway

Cloud-native stack

Executive exposure

Job summary

Morton Moore Pty Ltd in George, South Africa, seeks an experienced Data Science Lead to build and drive its AI/ML capability. This hands-on leadership role will remain close to modelling work while mentoring a growing team on-site in George.

You will own the full model lifecycle, run discovery sessions, and set technical standards for model quality, validation and governance, including POPIA compliance.

Qualifications

• Minimum five years in data science or ML.
• Proven track record delivering production models with measurable business impact.
• Strong Python and SQL; experience with modern data warehousing.
• Hands-on experience with supervised, unsupervised and time-series modelling.
• Experience owning the full model lifecycle from business requirements to production.
• Experience with cloud data platforms like Azure, GCP or AWS.
• Strong business engagement and stakeholder communication, including presenting to executives.
• Experience mentoring data scientists while remaining hands-on.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, development and deployment of ML models delivering business value.
• Own end-to-end model lifecycle from discovery to production monitoring.
• Run discovery sessions with stakeholders to define success metrics and roadmap.
• Build and maintain supervised, unsupervised and time-series models across use cases.
• Partner with Data/Analytics Engineering to ensure robust data pipelines for modelling.
• Set standards for model quality, validation and documentation.

Skills

Python

SQL

Cloud platforms

Stakeholder communication

Mentoring

Hands-on modelling

Leadership

Tools

Azure

Snowflake

dbt

Databricks

BigQuery ML

Job description

Morton Moore Pty Ltd in George, South Africa, seeks an experienced Data Science Lead to build and drive its AI/ML capability. This hands-on leadership role will remain close to modelling work while mentoring a growing team on-site in George.

You will own the full model lifecycle, run discovery sessions, and set technical standards for model quality, validation and governance, including POPIA compliance.