What will make you successful in this role?

• A Decision Scientist is responsible for the design, implementation, management and monitoring of operational systems which produce decisions in near real time or batch for the consumption by other systems or processes. They bring together machine learning and business processes operationally to produce actionable results which are consumed by business processes. They are also responsible for the monitoring, troubleshooting and reporting associated with or generated by the decision process. This leads to a continuous improvement strategy which should be tightly bound to Santam’s overarching strategy relative to the impacted business processes.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES:

• Solution Design
• Collaborate with Business Analysts, data engineers and system integrators to identify the appropriate technology and processes to use.
• Collaborate with Santam IT and Architects to spec and implement infrastructure to support the decisioning processes (including databases)
• Collaborate with Data Science/Actuarial teams around model fit and feature engineering processes.
• Collaborate with business to establish appropriate decision rules, or special conditions.
• Collaborate with Project Managers to understand compliance requirements and assist where necessary to ensure that the solution meets regulatory and legal requirements.
• Design the required data models.
• Establish the initial reporting requirements.
• Design monitoring and performance reports datasets to ensure that generated decisions can be monitored.
• Where possible, ensure that eventual outcome or result of the process is available for continuous improvement or fault diagnosis.
• Process Implementation
• Implement the Decision Process on the selected technology.
• Ensure proper process record keeping (all results of the process need to be auditable)
• Implement monitoring processes to identify faults.
• Build initial report dashboards.
• Maintain and optimise existing dashboards.
• Documentation
• Generate and maintain documentation and version information for all artefacts, including data lineages and transformations.
• Document expected business benefits.
• Detailed documentation on rules requested or implemented.
• Track incidents and changes.
• Set documentation standards and guidelines.
• Maintenance
• Ensure that processing is stable under BAU.
• Track and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.
• Address defects when identified.
• Provide audit information on specific Decisions as required.
• Collaborate with IT and security to ensure that vulnerabilities and patching is properly maintained.
• Reporting
• Assist/Lead with the design and implementation of reports, both technical and business related.

Qualifications & Experience

• BSc/bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Engineering or another discipline with a strong mathematical and programming component.
• Honours or postgraduate degree in the above (advantageous)
• Multiple programming languages
• Flexibility with learning new languages
• Extremely adaptable to implementing complex processes
• Min 5 years’ experience in:
• SOA/Microservices
• SQL (Structured Query Language)
• Query optimisation
• Machine Learning model development
• Machine Learning model deployment
   

Skills

• Solution Design
• System Integration
• Solution architecture
• Real Time/Batch process design and implementation
• Report design
• Requirements Gathering
• Data wrangling
• Feature Engineering
• Machine Learning
• Data Modelling
• Model Ops
• Trouble shooting
• Analytical and logical reasoning
• Time management
• Team player
• Excellent communication skills
• Influencing