Lead Data Scientist at NBC Bank | October 2024

NBC is the oldest serving bank in Tanzania with over five decades of experience. We offer a range of retail, business, corporate and investment banking, wealth management products and services.

Job Summary

The role involves fetching information from various sources and analyzing it to get a clear understanding of how an organization performs, using statistical and analytical methods plus AI tools to automate specific processes within the organization and develop smart solutions to business challenges. The objective is to help the organization analyze trends to make better decisions. The role leverages data-driven insights to inform and guide decision-making within an organization. It plays a crucial role in extracting valuable knowledge from large and complex datasets, which can be used to solve specific business problems and drive innovation.

Job Description

Key accountabilities

• Collect, acquire, and integrate data from various sources, such as databases, APIs, and external datasets.
• Ensure data quality and cleanliness through data cleaning and pre-processing.
• Conduct EDA to understand the characteristics of the data, identify patterns, and detect outliers.
• Visualize data using appropriate tools to gain insights.
• Engineer relevant features from raw data to enhance the performance of machine learning models.
• Select and transform variables for predictive modelling.
• Develop and train machine learning models for tasks like classification, regression, clustering, and recommendation.
• Optimize models for accuracy and efficiency.
• Create meaningful and visually appealing data visualizations to communicate findings to stakeholders.
• Apply statistical methods to analyse data and test hypotheses.
• Use statistical tests for significance and confidence interval estimation.
• Deploy machine learning models in production environments.
• Ensure models are scalable, maintainable, and continually monitored for performance.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including data engineers, domain experts, and business analysts, to understand requirements and objectives.
• Develop a deep understanding of the organization’s business goals and challenges.
• Align data science projects with business objectives.
• Adhere to ethical data practices, ensuring data privacy, security, and compliance with regulations.
• Maintain thorough documentation of data analysis, methodologies, and model development for reproducibility and knowledge sharing.
• Stay updated on the latest advancements in data science, machine learning, and relevant technologies.
• Manage data science projects, including scoping, timelines, and resource allocation.
• Prioritize tasks and ensure projects are delivered on time and within budget.
• Establish a feedback loop with stakeholders to incorporate their insights and refine models or analysis.
• Contribute to the development of a data strategy that aligns with the organization’s long-term goals.
• Deliver clear and concise presentations and reports to communicate findings, insights, and recommendations to executives and decision-makers.
• Ensure that machine learning models are interpretable, explaining the rationale behind predictions.
• Implement data governance policies and practices to maintain data quality, integrity, and accessibility.
• Formulate and test hypotheses to answer specific business questions using data

Education and Experience Required

• Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering/Computer Science/Data Science or related.
• At least 3-5 years of Statistical/Analytical Systems support experience.
• Minimum of 3-5-years’ experience in data science and modelling.
• Proven work experience as Data Scientist, Data Modeler, or similar role.
• In-depth understanding of database structure principles.
• Experience gathering and analyzing system requirements.
• Experience in data mining and modelling techniques.
• Experience in SQL, R, Python, and related technologies.

Knowledge, Skills & Competencies:

• A strong foundation in statistics is crucial for understanding data distributions, making inferences, and creating statistical models.
• Familiarity with machine learning techniques, such as regression, classification, clustering, and deep learning, is essential for predictive modeling and pattern recognition.
• Skilled in data visualization tools to communicate insights effectively.
• Proficiency in programming languages such as Python and R is essential for data manipulation and analysis.
• The ability to preprocess and clean data, handle missing values, and outliers is critical for accurate analysis.
• Proficiency in SQL for database management and querying is often required.
• Familiarity with big data technologies like Hadoop, Spark, or NoSQL databases for handling large datasets.
• The ability to effectively communicate complex findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders is essential.
• Proficiency in data wrangling tools and libraries to transform and prepare data.
• The ability to craft compelling narratives from data and present findings
• An understanding of the business context and objectives, enabling data-driven solutions that align with organizational goals.

Qualifications

Application of IT systems and tools, Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas – BMI – Business Management and Informatics, Business Analysis, Collaboration with others, Commercial mindset – Junior, Creative and innovative thinking, Experience in a similar environment, Reasoning, Results orientation