Job Description

SUMMARY:
Data Scientist - Investment & Short Term Insurance - Johannesburg - R550k to R750k per annum
POSITION INFO:
Join a financial services company as a Data Scientist transforming vast financial and short-term insurance datasets into actionable insights for portfolio managers, analysts, and risk teams. You'll build predictive models, automate due-diligence workflows, and surface performance drivers--spanning traditional market data and insurer-specific metrics such as claims frequency, loss ratios, and solvency capital requirements.
Responsibilities:

• Design ML / quant models for manager selection, risk attribution, alpha forecasting, and factor analysis--incorporating short-term insurance KPIs (e.g., combined ratio, reserve adequacy).
• Build scalable pipelines (Python, SQL, Spark/Dask) that ingest, cleanse, and enrich multi-manager and insurance data.
• Codify due-diligence, performance-benchmarking, and insurer-health monitoring into reproducible frameworks.
• Deliver real-time dashboards and APIs highlighting manager alpha and insurance-portfolio risk exposure.
• Partner with PMs, analysts, risk, and actuarial teams to translate business problems into data-driven solutions.
• Mentor junior analysts; promote best practices in ML-Ops and model governance.
• Stay current on AI/ML trends across investments and InsurTech; pilot relevant techniques (e.g., telematics-driven claims prediction, catastrophe risk modeling).
• Contribute to our cloud-first stack (Azure / AWS, Databricks, Snowflake)

Qualifications and Experience:

• Bachelor's or Master's in Data Science, Stats, Comp Sci, Math, or Financial Engineering
• 5-7 yrs hands on data science experience (

preferred) * Strong Python & SQL; expertise in ML libraries (Scikit learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow/PyTor

• Proven track record deploying models to production (CI/CD, monitoring, retraining)
• Cloud & big data know how (Azure / AWS, Spark, Databricks, Snowflake)

The Reference Number for this position is NG60433 which is a Permanent Hybrid role offering a salary of R550k up to R750k per annum salary negotiable based on experience. E-mail Nokuthula on nokuthulag@ e-Merge.co.za or call her for a chat on to discuss this and other opportunities.
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