Fraud Detection Data Scientist

Moniepoint; South Africa; On-site; ZAR 700,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Moniepoint in South Africa seeks a Data Scientist to join the fraud-fighting core. You’ll prototype and deploy ML models, run experiments, and uncover fraud signals across the ecosystem, partnering with engineers, product managers, and analysts to translate insights into production-grade systems.

The role emphasizes data-driven problem solving, model monitoring, and iterating experiments to balance customer experience with risk reduction.

Qualifications

• A strong foundation in statistics with a degree in a quantitative field (Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Computer Science, or similar).
• 3+ years of experience in data science, decision science, or risk analytics within fraud, payments, or financial crime.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning models in a production environment.
• Fraud, risk, or financial services experience is a strong plus.
• Solid grounding in data science fundamentals: experimentation, statistical inference, model evaluation, and feature engineering.
• Comfort working in fast-paced, cross-functional teams with high ownership expectations.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL; comfort working across the full model development lifecycle .
• An investigative instinct — you enjoy digging into data to find patterns others miss .
• The ability to communicate technical findings clearly to non-technical stakeholders and translate insights into action .

Responsibilities

• Prototype, evaluate, and help produce machine learning models for fraud detection; own their ongoing monitoring and retraining cycles .
• Design and run experiments to measure the impact of fraud interventions, balancing customer experience against loss reduction .
• Size fraud typologies across our product lines to inform prioritization and investment decisions .
• Build and maintain anomaly detection systems to surface novel fraud vectors before they scale .
• Work closely with fraud operations, engineers, product managers, and data analysts to translate model outputs into real-world mitigations .

Skills

Python

SQL

Fraud detection

Machine Learning

Education

Bachelor's degree in Statistics/Mathematics/CS

Tools

TensorFlow

Scikit-learn

Job description

Moniepoint in South Africa seeks a Data Scientist to join the fraud-fighting core. You’ll prototype and deploy ML models, run experiments, and uncover fraud signals across the ecosystem, partnering with engineers, product managers, and analysts to translate insights into production-grade systems.

The role emphasizes data-driven problem solving, model monitoring, and iterating experiments to balance customer experience with risk reduction.