Role summary

Cenfri is looking for a senior data scientist to join our team in Cape Town, South Africa, as part of our data for decision-making programme with the Government of Rwanda until 30 April 2027. The senior data scientist will be responsible for implementing and managing analytical projects at various entities in Rwanda. This involves the design and implementation of data pipelines, data quality assessments, processing and analytics, and reporting.

This role includes collaborating with external parties to understand their analytical priorities as well as providing advice on how to improve existing data processes. You will also be responsible for delegating tasks to juniors and managing a small team.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with client institutions to develop analytical plans to deliver on project objectives.
• Build the capacity of the data teams at partner institutions through knowledge sharing on projects and bespoke trainings.
• Manage and implement data projects with other team members.
• Develop ETL processes to enable partners to derive value from their data.
• Conduct descriptive analysis and predictive analytics on big data sets.
• Generate policy or business insights from analyses.
• Apply segmentation techniques to large record-level data sets, such as transactional telecommunications data, or demographic data sets.
• Conduct data landscaping activities at government entities to gain insight into the data collected and potential analytical applications for the data.
• Assess data quality and provide guidance on methods or techniques to improve data quality.
• Collaborate with external stakeholders on their analytical priorities.
• Provide guidance to government entities on how to optimize existing internal data processes.
• Merge data sets from different entities to enable richer data analysis.
• Develop APIs to streamline data sharing processes.
• Maintain documentation on all work conducted and generally ensure compliance with the Rwandan legal requirements for the analysis of personal data.

Requirements

• 8+ years of work experience on data-centred projects.
• Post graduate degree in either Data Science, Economics, Statistics, Operations Research, Engineering, Applied Mathematics or Computer Science.
• Experience with extracting, cleaning, and transforming data and working with data owners to understand the data.
• Experiencing in conducting analytical projects to inform decision-making processes (public sector experience is a bonus).
• Proficiency in SQL.
• Proficiency in R or Python, or any other scripting/programming language .
• Proficiency in MS-Office suite.

The ideal candidate

• Excellent problem-solving skills with a strong attention to detail.
• Can work independently and as part of a team.
• Has working experience using statistics.
• Ability to source and combine data from both structured and unstructured sources.
• Ability to formulate a clear problem statement, develop a plan for tackling it and clearly communicating findings verbally and in writing.
• A creative and enthusiastic attitude to unearthing valuable insights to solve economic problems.
• Have experience working with systems or applications that generate data.
• Ability to balance multiple priorities.

Placement and Location

This position is for a term contract until 30 April 2027 based at our offices in Cape Town. The role will require a lot of time (+/- 6 months per year) spent in Kigali, Rwanda to work from the premises of a partner institution.

Application instructions

If you identify with our values, are excited about impactful research and would like to contribute to our mission and vision, we would love to hear from you.

Closing date: 26 July 2024

Click here to apply.