Senior Data Scientist - Banking Analytics & ML

Postbank (SOC) Ltd; Pretoria; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Postbank (SOC) Ltd is seeking a Data Scientist to independently design, develop, validate and operationalise advanced analytics and machine-learning solutions for assigned business problems across banking domains.

You will translate complex business and regulatory questions into analytical approaches, ensure governance within approved frameworks, and produce auditable outputs that support operational, customer, financial, risk and regulatory decision-making across Postbank.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Data Science, Engineering, Economics, or a related quantitative field (NQF Level 7).
• Honours or Masters degree in a quantitative, data science, analytics or related field (NQF Level 8/9) (Ideal).
• 5+ Years Relevant data science, machine learning and algorithm-related experience at a specialist level.
• Experience in the Banking Industry (Advantageous).

Responsibilities

• Own assigned advanced analytics workstreams from problem framing to deployment-ready output.
• Translate business problems into analytical hypotheses, data requirements, modelling approaches and delivery plans.
• Design and build statistical, machine-learning and optimisation models using appropriate techniques and documented assumptions.
• Determine suitable validation, back-testing and monitoring approaches for assigned models and analytical outputs.
• Convert model and analysis results into clear business recommendations, implementation options and risk considerations for stakeholders.
• Acquire, integrate, profile and transform structured and unstructured data from approved sources.
• Design repeatable data preparation, feature engineering and analytical pipelines with appropriate quality controls.
• Maintain version-controlled code, model artefacts, assumptions, metadata, outputs and documentation for auditability and knowledge retention.
• Identify data-quality, lineage, completeness and integrity issues and recommend corrective actions to the Senior Specialist.
• Engage business, operations, BI, automation, data and technology stakeholders to clarify requirements and implementation constraints.
• Present analytical findings to technical and non-technical audiences in a clear, evidence-based manner.
• Provide specialist input into analytics standards, reusable methods, reusable code libraries and continuous-improvement initiatives.
• Guide junior analysts or project contributors on technical methods where required, without formal people-management accountability.

Job description

Postbank (SOC) Ltd is seeking a Data Scientist to independently design, develop, validate and operationalise advanced analytics and machine-learning solutions for assigned business problems across banking domains.

You will translate complex business and regulatory questions into analytical approaches, ensure governance within approved frameworks, and produce auditable outputs that support operational, customer, financial, risk and regulatory decision-making across Postbank.