Remote Lead Data Scientist, Fintech & Banking

Placements24; Centurion; Hybrid; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Competitive salary

Health insurance

Retirement plan

Professional development budget

Global team collaboration

Leadership growth opportunities

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to spearhead advanced analytics from a remote-first base in Centurion, Gauteng. You will guide a team of data scientists and develop ML solutions for forecasting, risk, fraud, and customer insights in Banking & Finance.

Strong leadership and cloud experience are essential for shaping our data strategy and delivering impact across South Africa. This role offers high visibility, collaboration with product and engineering teams, and opportunities to

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, or a related quantitative field.
• Minimum of 8 years of experience in data science, with at least 2 years in a leadership or team lead role.
• Proven track record of successfully developing and deploying machine learning models in a production environment, preferably within fintech or Banking & Finance.
• Expertise in Python or R with libraries such as scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of data scientists, fostering innovation and technical excellence.
• Design, develop, and implement ML models for financial forecasting, risk assessment, fraud detection, and customer segmentation.
• Collaborate with product managers and engineers to translate business needs into analytical solutions.
• Oversee the data science project lifecycle from problem definition to deployment and monitoring.
• Drive research into new data science techniques relevant to fintech.

Skills

Leadership

Data science leadership

Machine learning

Python

R

Big data

Cloud platforms

Communication

Remote work

Education

PhD in quantitative field

Master's degree

Tools

scikit-learn

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Spark

Hadoop

AWS

Azure

GCP

SQL

NoSQL

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to spearhead advanced analytics from a remote-first base in Centurion, Gauteng. You will guide a team of data scientists and develop ML solutions for forecasting, risk, fraud, and customer insights in Banking & Finance.

Strong leadership and cloud experience are essential for shaping our data strategy and delivering impact across South Africa. This role offers high visibility, collaboration with product and engineering teams, and opportunities to