Head of Data Science

Full Job Description

Head of Data Science position available in Cape Town.

A renowned international messaging company is looking for a “Head of Data Science” to join their team on a full-time permanent basis in either Cape Town or Bryanston, Johannesburg.

Excellent compensation package on offer (subject to background and experience) plus internal career advancement opportunities.

Skills and Experience:

• Advanced degree in data science, statistics, computer science, or similar.
• Ability to collaborate with business stakeholders’ executives and convert these requirements to data and modelling outcomes.
• Strong knowledge of Python or other common processing languages
• Experience with data feature engineering from multiple and large transactional datasets.
• Competent in machine learning principles and techniques.
• MLOps experience would be advantageous.

Technical skills:

• A strong background in running large scale databases (1Tb+ data); Ideally Clickhouse/Kafka but at least Postgres/MySQL with hundreds of billions of rows.
• Strongly skilled in SQL including new and platform-specific features such as CTEs, array unnesting etc.
• Strong experience of optimising database query performance – how different types of indexes work and their underlying performance characteristics (bloom filter, n-gram, b-tree, hash etc).
• Strong knowledge of Python or other common data processing languages at scale. Especially the difference required in program structure between analysing 1 million data points and 1 billion data points.
• Proven experience of building good quality and highly performant ML models, for example using technology like catboost.
• We use grafana internally for reporting, so knowledge of this is a plus.
• Understanding best-practises for structuring, versioning and labelling of database schemata
• Experience of NLP is also a bonus and may be focus for us in the future as we build out chat-bots and other forms of conversational technology.
• A love of writing tests – unit, functional, end-to-end, smoke, …
• Proven ability and interest in picking up new technologies quickly, leading evaluations and providing suggestions of key technologies to base future development around.
• Good problem-solving ability, especially under pressure.
• A passion to lead and mentor more junior developers/data scientists.
• An ability to explain and articulate technical detail clearly to technical management and systems teams.
• A passion for writing documentation and training other staff.
• Devops experience, alongside administering and automating Linux-based platforms would be a big bonus.