Johannesburg: Senior Data Scientist

What you will be doing: Lead the design, development, and deployment of LLM- and generative AI-based solutions that address large-scale and complex problems and materially drive the company’s global product offerings and strategy forward. Collaborate with product owners, project managers, and executive stakeholders to identify and prioritise business problems that can be solved with LLMs. Conduct desktop research into the state-of-the-art in LLMs and Generative AI and apply findings to real-world applications (either requested by business or suggested by yourself). Conduct research and development of speech-to-text and audio-based language models, integrating with LLM pipelines where applicable. Conduct experimental research on the use of LLMs in real-world company applications to ensure that design and development decisions are made scientifically, and optimise for and balance all business requirements. These include accuracy, scalability, efficiency, reliability, safety, and cost-effectiveness. Translate strategic direction into technical product definitions and roadmaps. Participate actively in internal and external communities discussing and designing policies for the ethical use of AI, and ensure your team’s work meets ethical AI standards. Contribute substantially to a culture of innovation, leading the prototyping and development of novel methodologies and approaches. Provide strong thought leadership in this regard. Communicate complex technical concepts to executives and non-technical stakeholders effectively. Demonstrate strong emotional intelligence by understanding and uplifting team members, and skilfully managing challenging situations with composure. Advise other teams in the business on best practice based on your experience. Mining large structured and unstructured datasets to find new insights to inform operational efficiency and ‘member- delight’ interaction strategies Research and application of the most up to date machine learning algorithms and AI techniques Present data and model findings in a way that provides actionable insights to business users Monitoring model performance What we are looking for : Honours or Master’s degree in Computer Science with solid experience in statistical modelling, data mining and machine learning, OR Honours or Master’s degree in either Data Science, Statistics, or Applied Mathematics with some experience in software engineering, computer science or working with bigdisparate sets of data 5 years of experience in data science, with a recent focus on generative AI. Expert in data science programming languages such as R, Python, Scala Expert in data manipulation skills including SQL to extract, transform and load data Experience in interactive data exploration and data-driven story telling Understanding and application of Big Data and distributed computing principles Hands on experience with Big Data systems will be preferred Strong analytical and statistical knowledge with an understanding of the latest machine learning algorithms for both structured and unstructured data Ability to adapt to emerging technologies and tools Proficiency in version control systems such as Git for collaborative coding and maintaining code integrity Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP, Azure, or AWS Experience with tools such as Whisper, DeepSpeech, OpenAI or HuggingFace Experience in sourcing and combining data from both structured and unstructured sources Experience with Google Tensor flow Familiarity with MLops practices and tools Proven tack record of Data Science or AI project delivery Deep understanding of LLMs and experience with models like GPTs, LLaMa, Gemini etc Please note that if you do not hear from us within 3 weeks, consider your application unsuccessful.