Lead Data Scientist: ML Leader in Finance (Hybrid)

Placements24; Centurion; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work

Health insurance

Leadership opportunities

Tech budget

Retirement plan

Office in Centurion

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Data Scientist for a prominent financial services firm in Centurion, Gauteng. This leadership role drives advanced analytics, mentors a team, and guides strategic ML initiatives across the business.

You will work with large datasets to build production models, perform customer analytics, fraud detection, and risk assessment, while communicating insights to senior management. The role offers a hybrid work setup, generous development opportunities, and access to

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science/Statistics/Mathematics or related field.
• 8+ years in data science and ML with at least 2 years in a leadership role.
• Proven experience deploying production ML models (classification, regression, clustering, NLP, DL).
• Strong Python or R and libraries (scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Pandas, NumPy).

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of data scientists.
• Develop and deploy ML models for predictive analytics, customer segmentation, fraud detection, and risk management.
• Identify business problems that can be addressed with data science and ML.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate data needs into analytics projects.
• Design and execute data mining and feature engineering strategies.
• Evaluate algorithms and communicate findings to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Stay updated with advancements in data science and AI; ensure ethical use of data.

Skills

Leadership

Statistical Modeling

Machine Learning

Data Visualization

Communication

Education

Master's or Ph.D. in quantitative field

Tools

scikit-learn

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Pandas

NumPy

SQL

Spark

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Data Scientist for a prominent financial services firm in Centurion, Gauteng. This leadership role drives advanced analytics, mentors a team, and guides strategic ML initiatives across the business.

You will work with large datasets to build production models, perform customer analytics, fraud detection, and risk assessment, while communicating insights to senior management. The role offers a hybrid work setup, generous development opportunities, and access to