Data Scientist - Financial Stability Department at South African Reserve Bank

Brief description

The main purpose of this position is to leverage industry knowledge and analytical expertise to lead the analysis of data in support of policy and decision making with respect to the departmental strategic mandate.

Detailed description

The successful candidate will be responsible for the following key performance areas:

• Identify value driving opportunities for the application of advanced analytics in achieving the departmental mandate.
• Execute advanced analytics’ use cases to derive insights across key departmental subject areas.
• Identify, source and assess relevant structured and unstructured data for statistical modelling.
• Prepare data for statistical modelling by identifying data correlations and collinearity and performing required feature engineering.
• Develop robust statistical models that are modular, scalable, deployable, reproducible and versioned for analytics and reporting purposes and to ensure that models are validated and meet required performance thresholds.
• Fully document analytics use cases according to best practice standards (including documentation of model selection, validation, algorithms and code).
• Monitor, measure and report on analytical results to ensure appropriate business recommendations and insights. The analytical results may require the decision requirements model to be updated.
• Deploy, maintain, enhance, optimise and automate analytics solutions.
• Identify and mitigate risks (i.e. model biases) and ensure adherence to ethics principles (fairness, privacy, transparency and accountability) with regard to data and advanced analytics modelling.
• Align work outputs to relevant departmental and South African Reserve Bank (SARB) strategies and to enterprise information management (EIM) and governance standards and frameworks.
• Communicate complex analytics concepts in a clear and concise manner to assist researchers and stakeholders in interpreting model outputs and informing decision and policy actions.
• Collaborate and proactively engage stakeholders from business and functional support areas across the analytics life cycle to ensure solutions are well formulated, deployed, supported and adopted.
• Keep abreast of industry best practices, techniques and technologies and lead the implementation thereof to ensure value-enhancing advanced analytics solutions.

Job requirements

To be considered for this position, candidates must have:

• a Bachelor’s degree (NQF 7) in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) field or an equivalent qualification;
• data science certification;
• data analytics or visualisation certification;
• an advanced degree will be a strong advantage; and
• six to eight years’ of experience in building, maintaining and optimising data and business intelligence (BI) solutions of which:
• at least three to five years’ experience in building advanced analytics solutions as part of the analytics setup in a company/analytics services provider; and
• a minimum of two years’ experience in deploying, maintaining and optimising advanced analytics solutions.