Senior Data Scientist - AI, Customer Insight & Decisioning

The Focus Group; Sandton; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

The Focus Group is seeking a senior Data Scientist to design, develop and optimise machine learning, AI and decisioning solutions across Personal & Private Banking and Digital channels. You will leverage the Databricks platform to build scalable analytics assets and collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities include feature engineering, model development, experimentation, governance, and mentoring junior data scientists while delivering measurable business value with

Qualifications

• Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematical Statistics, Actuarial Science, Mathematics, Econometrics or a related quantitative field.
• Masters or Doctorate will be an added advantage.

Responsibilities

• Partner with PPB, Digital, Product and Risk teams to identify and prioritise high-value analytical opportunities.
• Design, develop, train and optimise machine learning models using Databricks, MLflow and distributed compute environments.
• Develop customer propensity, next best action, next best product, customer value, retention and engagement models.
• Develop risk, collections, fraud and operational models to improve business performance and decision quality.
• Build and maintain reusable feature pipelines using Databricks Feature Engineering and Delta tables.
• Define, create and govern reusable enterprise features for inclusion within the Databricks Enterprise Feature Store.
• Establish feature definitions, feature quality controls, lineage and monitoring standards across business domains.
• Perform feature engineering, feature selection and feature importance analysis to improve model performance and reuse.
• Develop optimisation and decisioning models that support customer engagement, product recommendation and operational decision strategies.
• Conduct exploratory data analysis, statistical analysis, hypothesis testing and model validation using Databricks notebooks and workflows.
• Perform model tuning, calibration, challenger model development and performance benchmarking.
• Monitor model performance, stability, drift and business outcomes and recommend improvements where required.
• Develop Generative AI use cases where appropriate, including customer support, document intelligence and knowledge-based assistants.
• Work closely with ML Engineers to productionise models and features into enterprise platforms and decisioning systems.
• Produce model documentation, validation reports and governance artefacts in line with model risk management requirements.
• Mentor junior Data Scientists and contribute to modelling standards, reusable frameworks and analytical best practices.

Skills

Databricks Notebooks

MLflow

Feature Store

Python

SQL

Machine Learning

Statistical Modelling

Predictive Analytics

Prescriptive Analytics

Customer Decisioning

Optimisation

Experimentation

Model Validation

Generative AI

LLMs

Data Visualisation

Stakeholder Management

Education

Masters or Doctorate

Computer Science / Data Science / Engineering / Quantitative Field

Tools

Databricks

Job description

The Focus Group is seeking a senior Data Scientist to design, develop and optimise machine learning, AI and decisioning solutions across Personal & Private Banking and Digital channels. You will leverage the Databricks platform to build scalable analytics assets and collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities include feature engineering, model development, experimentation, governance, and mentoring junior data scientists while delivering measurable business value with