Head of Data Science, SSA,

Company Description

Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid. At Visa, you'll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world.

Join Visa and do work that matters – to you, to your community, and to the world. Progress starts with you.

Position Summary

The Senior Director of Data Science would be leading Data Science for the SSA (SSA) team. We are seeking an innovative and analytical thinker to champion our data-driven strategies for the region. As a Senior Director, you are expected to participate in business development, guide team to develop predictive and prescriptive models, develop context-based proto-types and high impact storyboards to promote a data-driven strategy and solutioning approach for the company.

The candidate should be aware of & comfortable in using new technologies such as Agentic AI & Gen AI.

Principal Responsibilities

• Manage and execute projects and client engagement for all the clients in SSA for VCA
• Leverage learnings from other region and apply those in SSA
• Provide leadership and mentoring to junior resources within SSA DS team
• Establish and maintain relationship with key stakeholders in SSA market
• Work closely with Hub DS team to leverage data solutions & consumer signals to create efficiency within the region.
• Use strong banking knowledge to design and develop campaign processes for the clients
• Provide leadership to identify strategic and tactical innovation opportunities around data and data-related processes that will promote fact-based decisioning processes
• Help set strategic direction and roadmap for the Data Science group in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Work with regional and global Data Science teams to develop high-quality analytic products and solutions that promote growth and business development for the region
• Keep us at the forefront of technical advancement in Data Science by introducing cutting-edge tools and techniques for generating business insights
• Develop next-generation analytic methods where existing techniques are not adequate to address business challenges
• Review, direct, guide, and inspire the analytical work of junior members in the team
• Collaborate with technology partners to build an Analytics Technology Ecosystem that supports advanced decisioning
• Managing team workload, providing prioritization guidance for project flow to improve process efficiency
• Manage and grow talent within the team
• Develop, share, and build global best practices and knowledge management within the team
• Socialise innovative ideas and approaches that are scalable and have market demand

Professional Experience

• Minimum of 15+ years of analytics expertise in applying statistical solutions to business problems
• Experience working in one or more of the Card Payments markets around the globe
• Post-graduate degree (Masters or PhD) in a Quantitative field such as Statistics, Mathematics, Operational Research, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, or equivalent
• Good understanding of the Payments and Banking Industry including aspects such as consumer credit, consumer debit, prepaid, small business, commercial, co-branded and merchant
• Good knowledge of data, market intelligence, business intelligence, and AI-driven tools and technologies
• Experience planning, organising, and managing multiple large projects with diverse cross-functional teams
• Demonstrated ability to incorporate new techniques to solve business problems

Technical Expertise

• Expertise in distributed computing environments / big data platforms (Hadoop, Elasticsearch, etc.) as well as common database systems and value stores (SQL, Hive, HBase, etc.)
• Ability to write scratch Map Reduce jobs and fluency with Spark frameworks
• Familiarity with both common computing environments (e.g. Linux, Shell Scripting) and commonly-used IDE’s (Jupyter Notebooks); proficiency in SAS…