Data Scientist

homechoice is a leading South African homeware retailer. For almost 40 years we’ve helped our customers create beautiful homes they love with an innovative range of quality products they can afford.

The purpose of this role is to create and maintain data processing procedures enrichment support business selections marketing key, but understanding credit, fraud and channels. The Data Science team maintains predictive machine-learning models in production, whose outputs guide decision-making in Marketing, Credit Risk and the Channels.

**What you will love doing in this role**
- **Create and maintain data implementations and selections**
- Gain insight into Marketing, Credit, Fraud, and Channels, including customer selections (new and existing).
- Collaborate with Business and IT teams to implement proposed solutions and strategies effectively.
- **Team Mentorship and Leadership**
- Lead a team of Junior Data Scientists and ensure they have the necessary resources, guidance, and support to succeed.
- Set clear performance expectations, conduct regular performance evaluations together with the Head of Department, and provide ongoing coaching and professional development opportunities.
- Foster a collaborative and innovative team culture, promoting knowledge sharing and continuous learning
- **Maintaining and monitoring of existing predictive models in production**
- Ensures that existing model performance does not degrade over time.
- Picks up model errors early (prior to model outputs being used by the business)
- Writes code to monitor the historic performance of existing models.
- Writes code to monitor the integrity of the mode input data.
- **Reporting (accurate, informative and scientific)**
- Delivers consistent reports in excel, which do not contain any errors.
- Objectively quantifies the uncertainty surrounding estimates (e.g. confidence intervals)
- Presents results clearly, in a way that clearly guides business decision-making
- **Adherence and contribution to best practice (statistical and software)**
- Knows and understands the existing team best practice specifications.
- Implements best practice in their daily work.
- Contributes to the team best practice specifications.
- **Maintaining and contributing to the data science tool kit (code base)**
- Effectively uses the tools in the existing team code base
- Recommends tools that can be added to the existing team code base, and ones that can be improved
- Adds new code to the existing team code base (with sufficient testing)
- **Continuous Automation of Regular Processes**
- Writes code that reduces the time taken to run regular processes, without reducing the output quality.
- Ensures that automated processes generate sufficient logging that the team maintains trust in the output.

**What you'll need to do this role**
- Undergraduate degree containing mathematics, statistics or computer science.
- Advance SAS Language (WPS, Altair or similar SAS base programming) skills
- Previous experience in Retail and/or Credit sector advantageous
- Previous data science, machine learning or statistical role.
- High proficiency in MS Excel.
- Statistics and probability theory.

**Behaviors we love**
- Wow my **customer**
- Walk in my customers’ shoes
- Deliver on my promises
- Deliver insight-led solutions my customers need
- Treat the business as?**my own**
- Take accountability
- Be curious, creative & explore opportunities
- Do it right & at the right time
- Play as a **team**
- Be helpful
- Be inclusive
- Find the fun