Senior Pharma Data Scientist – ML for Drug Discovery (Remote)

Placements24; South Africa; Remote; ZAR 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid/Remote options

Wellness program

Home office reimbursement

ESOP and incentives

Job summary

Placements24 is seeking a highly analytical and innovative Senior Data Scientist to join their analytics team in a fully remote capacity, with occasional travel to Johannesburg or Cape Town. You will develop predictive models, drive product innovation, and collaborate with engineering and product teams to deploy AI solutions at scale.

The role requires 7+ years in data science, leadership experience, and strong Python, SQL, and Lakehouse skills, with English fluency and excellent communication.

Qualifications

• Senior-level data science expertise across ML, statistics, and AI in production.
• Advanced Python with Jupyter Notebooks, pandas, NumPy, and scikit-learn.
• Experience with Delta Lake or Lakehouse architectures (PySpark, feature stores, data versioning).
• Strong data warehouse skills (Azure Synapse, SQL).
• Analytics/visualisation with Power BI and Python tools.
• Leadership experience mentoring data scientists and owning delivery.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication.

Responsibilities

• Own the analytical roadmap and backlog, shaping delivery of analytics initiatives.
• Deliver end-to-end customer analytics and communicate findings to senior stakeholders.
• Write production-grade Python and maintainable code using modern practices.
• Apply warehouse and Lakehouse best practices for data provenance and traceability.
• Use AI throughout the delivery lifecycle, including agentic workflows.
• Generate insight from multi-party data and validate conclusions.
• Support Data Science leadership and mentor team members.

Skills

Senior data science

Advanced Python

Delta Lake

SQL & T-SQL

Power BI

Leadership

English communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in STEM

Tools

PySpark

PyTest

FastAPI

Kubernetes

Job description

Placements24 is seeking a highly analytical and innovative Senior Data Scientist to join their analytics team in a fully remote capacity, with occasional travel to Johannesburg or Cape Town. You will develop predictive models, drive product innovation, and collaborate with engineering and product teams to deploy AI solutions at scale.

The role requires 7+ years in data science, leadership experience, and strong Python, SQL, and Lakehouse skills, with English fluency and excellent communication.