Mid​/Senior Data Scientist; Fraud

Location

Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa

Yassir is the Super App designed to make your life easier. Yassir’s Mission is to serve Africans in the continent and its diaspora while creating economic opportunities for service providers and infusing social values. We aspire towards providing our users with the most essential services to their door by leveraging technology and a large ecosystem of partners. We stand for ambition, transparency & trust, quality, performance, and are growing fast.

We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Data Scientist to join our Artificial Intelligence (AI) team and contribute to key projects such as Fraud Detection and Trip Dispatching. The role involves analyzing and modelling data to optimize our Machine Learning (ML) systems, providing value through predictive modelling and software development expertise.

The AI team is part of Yassir’s central Data & AI domain, responsible for all data-related activities in the organisation – from Data Engineering, Data Platform management, and Analytics to AI solutions and MLOps infrastructure development. It is a global team of experts working together to build state‑of‑the‑art infrastructure, foster a data culture, and deliver impact.

• Become an expert point of contact and thought leader on Fraud Detection and Revenue Leakage Prevention.
• Identify and propose ML opportunities related to your scope and beyond.
• Support requirement definition and prioritisation of ML projects.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional Engineering and Product teams.
• Champion Data Quality as a critical input to all ML solutions and analytics.
• Conduct Exploratory Data Analysis, Feature Selection/Engineering.
• Utilise statistical and ML techniques for model training, validation and tuning.
• Visualise analysis and modelling results with actionable metrics.
• Deploy and test ML applications using our MLOps infrastructure.
• Monitor models for technical performance, business impact and concept drift.
• Explain technical solutions in a business‑friendly manner.
• Maintain and improve technical documentation; support the domain’s technical capabilities.
• Champion Data Culture, share knowledge, participate in team‑building activities.

• Solid mathematical, statistical and ML skills, backed by a Masters degree or above in a quantitative field.
• 3+ years of production‑quality Python and SQL experience; proficiency in software engineering concepts (optimisation, testing, scalability).
• Prior experience with Fraud/Risk problems or related modelling techniques.
• Comfortable with statistical concepts such as testing and causal analysis.
• Analytical thinking, problem‑solving and an engineering mindset.
• Visualization skills with Python ecosystem libraries or BI tools.
• Experience with Cloud services – GCP highly preferred.
• Mastery of the end‑to‑end ML model development lifecycle.
• Excellent communication skills – presentation, oral and written.
• Positive attitude, resilience, interpersonal and stakeholder‑management skills.
• Self‑motivation, project management and the ability to work independently.

• Experience in On‑Demand, Mobility or Financial Services companies.
• Experience working on ML features for Digital Products (apps, websites).

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process; final hiring decisions are made by humans.

Not applicable

Full‑time

Engineering and Information Technology

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