Senior Data Scientist — Banking ML on Databricks (12-month)

Ovations Talent Sourcing; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 700,000 - 1,100,000; Full time

Job summary

Ovations Talent Sourcing is seeking a Senior Data Scientist for a 12-month contract in the banking sector. Focus areas include end-to-end ML/AI, predictive modelling, and decision science leveraging the Databricks platform.

You will work on feature engineering, governance, and productionizing models across Personal & Private Banking and Digital channels, collaborating with PPB, Digital, Risk, and MLOps teams to deliver scalable analytical assets.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or higher in a quantitative field (Data Science, CS, Engineering, Math/Statistics, Econometrics, Actuarial).
• Hands-on Databricks: Notebooks, Workflows, MLflow, Feature Store/Delta tables.
• Python and SQL proficiency for large-scale data manipulation and ML.
• Experience building customer propensity, next-best-action, retention, or risk models in financial services.
• End-to-end feature engineering, model tuning, validation, governance, and productionization with engineers.

Responsibilities

• Model Development & GenAI: design, train and optimize ML/AI models using Databricks and MLflow.
• Feature Engineering & Governance: build reusable enterprise feature pipelines with full quality controls.
• Decisioning & Optimization: develop decision science models for acquisition, engagement, cross-sell, and operations.
• Monitoring & Governance: monitor model performance, drift; document governance artifacts for risk compliance.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: work with PPB, Digital, Risk and MLOps to deploy production-ready analytics.

Skills

Python

SQL

Domain modelling

End-to-End execution

Education

Degree in Data Science/CS/Engineering/Math/Actuarial/Econometrics

Tools

Databricks

MLflow

Delta tables

Feature Store

Job description

Ovations Talent Sourcing is seeking a Senior Data Scientist for a 12-month contract in the banking sector. Focus areas include end-to-end ML/AI, predictive modelling, and decision science leveraging the Databricks platform.

You will work on feature engineering, governance, and productionizing models across Personal & Private Banking and Digital channels, collaborating with PPB, Digital, Risk, and MLOps teams to deliver scalable analytical assets.