Senior Data Scientist — AI/IA & Big Data Innovator

Vodafone; Midrand; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Enticing incentive programs

Competitive benefits packages

Retirement funds

Medical aid benefits

Phone and data benefits

Staff discounts

Job summary

Vodacom is seeking a data science leader with 4–6 years in Big Data and Data Science to develop AI products and ML models at scale. You will work on GenAI/LLMs, design experiments, and collaborate with engineering to productionize AI workloads. Mentorship and clear stakeholder communication are key to success.

You will contribute to Vodacom's AI capability across Africa, delivering value through data-driven insights and robust model pipelines in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in quantitative fields is essential.
• 4–6 years of relevant Big Data and Data Science experience.
• Experience with GenAI, LLMs and recommender systems is highly desirable.

Responsibilities

• Create AI/IA products delivering new services for Vodacom and stakeholders.
• Develop, validate and productionise ML models on large datasets with strong statistics and feature engineering.
• Contribute to AI capability across Vodacom globally and mentor data scientists.
• Build ML models for various business areas on Big Data Platforms.
• Track model performance, ROI and communicate insights with clear visuals.
• Collaborate with data science leaders to deliver strategic initiatives.
• Partner with Big Data Engineering to automate and productionize AI workloads.
• Translate analytic findings into practical recommendations for campaigns.
• Design experiments and AB tests with clearly defined success metrics.
• Present results to technical and non-technical audiences.

Skills

GenAI & LLMs

Recommendation systems

SQL

Python

Spark / PySpark

MLOps / LLMOps

Data visualization

Communication & mentoring

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in quantitative fields

Tools

AWS SageMaker

Glue

Athena

Lambda

S3

OpenSearch

Tableau / PowerBI

Job description

Vodacom is seeking a data science leader with 4–6 years in Big Data and Data Science to develop AI products and ML models at scale. You will work on GenAI/LLMs, design experiments, and collaborate with engineering to productionize AI workloads. Mentorship and clear stakeholder communication are key to success.

You will contribute to Vodacom's AI capability across Africa, delivering value through data-driven insights and robust model pipelines in a fast-paced environment.