Senior Data Scientist — FinTech ML for SME Growth

Lula; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 700,000 - 1,100,000; Full time

Job summary

Lula in Cape Town is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to turn data into decisions across product, operations, finance, marketing and credit. You will frame problems, build analyses and models, and deliver results to teams who act on them.

Your work focuses on practical data science with a strong machine learning edge, ensuring models run reliably in production and setting Lula’s data science standards. You’ll help grow SMEs in South Africa through smarter data use.

Qualifications

• 3-5 years' experience in data science or advanced analytics.
• Proven experience productionising ML models and monitoring them.
• Experience building and evaluating ML models on real-world data.
• 3+ years' experience with Python for data analysis or modelling.

Responsibilities

• Partner with stakeholders to translate business questions into analytical problems and communicate findings clearly.
• Own the productionisation of ML models, including pipelines, versioned code, testing and deployment.
• Monitor models in production for performance, drift and data quality; drive retraining and improvement.
• Build, validate and maintain predictive models (classification, regression, forecasting, segmentation).
• Explore, clean and analyse large datasets to uncover trends and opportunities.
• Design and analyse experiments (A/B tests, pilots) and measure impact of initiatives.
• Build dashboards, reports and reusable analysis assets for self-serve insights.
• Contribute to data quality, documentation and best practices across the data team.

Skills

Data science

Machine learning

Productionisation

Experiment design

Data visualization

Tools

Python

SQL

Git

Pandas

scikit-learn

Hex

dbt

Job description

Lula in Cape Town is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to turn data into decisions across product, operations, finance, marketing and credit. You will frame problems, build analyses and models, and deliver results to teams who act on them.

Your work focuses on practical data science with a strong machine learning edge, ensuring models run reliably in production and setting Lula’s data science standards. You’ll help grow SMEs in South Africa through smarter data use.