Job title: Data Scientist
Company: Emergent Africa
Location / workplace type: South Africa – Hybrid or Remote (occasional client onsite)
Employment type: Full-time
Seniority: Mid-Senior
Function: Data Science, Analytics
Industries: Management Consulting, Information Services, Technology

About Emergent Africa

We help organisations turn data and digital into decisions that deliver measurable outcomes across Strategy, Digital, Decision Intelligence, and Sustainability.

The role

Own end-to-end modelling for clients across various sectors: frame the problem, design experiments, build/validate models, and deploy insights that shift KPIs (forecasting, optimisation, classification, NLP, causal analysis).

What you’ll do

• Translate ambiguous questions into testable hypotheses and measurable impact.
• Build and validate models (time-series, classification/regression, NLP).
• Engineer features, evaluate with proper cross-validation and ROI lenses.
• Design and analyse experiments, define metrics and dashboards.
• Deploy models (batch/APIs) with MLOps practices, monitor performance and drift.
• Communicate results to executive and non-technical audiences.

Qualifications (Required) – Degrees & Certifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, Econometrics, Operations Research, or similar.
• Postgraduate degree strongly preferred for mid-senior roles (BSc Hons/MSc in a listed field).
• Solid grounding in statistics/experiment design, proficiency in Python and SQL.

Qualifications (Preferred/Advantageous)

• MSc/PhD in a quantitative discipline.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks, and NLP toolkits, exposure to causal inference/uplift.
• Familiarity with data warehouses, data lakes, BI storytelling.
• Cloud ML certifications (e.g., AWS Machine Learning, Azure, Google Professional ML Engineer).