Data Scientist
Remote data scientist at Wave, a fintech building mobile money services across Africa. Day to day: build credit scoring and fraud detection models, optimize field operations and agent networks, and design A/B tests for user promotions, working closely with product and operations teams using Python, SQL, statistics and ML.
- Compensation
- $130.6K–$236.2K / yr
- Location
- Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Data science
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field (Statistics, Mathematics, Economics, Computer Science, Engineering, or related)
- 5+ years of experience in data science, machine learning or technical analytics roles
- Deep expertise with Python, SQL, and data visualization tools
- Experience in one or more of: machine learning, causal inference, statistical modeling, or A/B testing
- Highly effective written communication and presentation skills
- Track record of translating complex data into clear, actionable insights for technical and business stakeholders
- Fluency in English
Nice to have
- Master's or PhD
- Experience applying these methods in operational settings with offline components
- French
- Bias for action and ability to thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
- Experience working in early stage product teams or a rapidly scaling product
- Excellent focus, prioritizing work iteratively and knowing when a project is good enough
- Able to present findings to technical and non-technical audiences with proactive data-driven recommendations
Full description
Our mission
We're making Africa the first cashless continent.
In 2017, over half the population in Sub-Saharan Africa had no bank account. That's for good reason—the fees are too high, the closest branch can be miles away, and nobody takes cards. Without access to financial institutions, people are forced to keep their savings under the mattress. Small business owners rely on lenders who charge extortionate rates. Parents spend hours waiting in line to pay school fees in cash.
We're solving this by building financial services that just work: no account fees, instantly available, and accepted everywhere. In places where electricity, water and roads don't always work, you can still send money with Wave. In 2017, we launched a mobile app in Senegal for cash deposit, withdrawal, and peer-to-peer and business payments. Now, we have millions of users across 9 countries and are growing fast.
Our goal is to make Africa the first cashless continent and that's where you come in...
How you'll help us achieve it
We’re looking for an experienced Data Scientist to join our team. You’ll work on projects across the business, from building credit scoring models and improving fraud detection to optimizing field visit schedules and designing A/B tests for targeted user promotions.
In this role, you’ll partner with product managers and business leaders to understand the problems they’re trying to solve and find practical ways to use data to improve outcomes. Our ideal candidate is product-minded, scrappy and thinks about data in terms of intuitive user behaviours rather than just inputs to a black box model.
In this role you’ll;
- Be embedded closely with our product and operations teams.
- Generate insights using customer, merchant and internal data using statistical modelling, data visualization, and machine learning.
- Design, implement and analyze optimizations for our internal operations, user promos, and agent network to help teams scale and reduce costs.
- Build data-driven heuristics and machine-learning models to improve user and business outcomes.
- Take ownership of the analytics process - from project scoping and design to communicating findings to stakeholders.
Key details
- This is a fully remote role. Candidates must be based in one of our talent hub countries (US, UK, Spain, Kenya and Ghana) or in one of our operating markets in Africa including Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, or Burkina Faso.
- Wave provides a yearly $1,200 stipend to support coworking meetups with teammates.
- Remote team members are expected to travel to our operational markets (e.g. Senegal or Côte d'Ivoire) at least once a year. Exceptions apply, but we’ve found this key to understanding our users and product.