Data Scientist

Job Description

We are looking for a smart, ambitious and innovative Data Scientist to join my client Waterloo Road, Wynberg, Cape Town.

Company background

Vicinity Media is a premium location-based ad network based in South Africa with global reach. We provide real-time location-based ads to mobile users increasing ad relevance. For example, you could be reading news on a publisher’s site like timeslive.co.za in Long Street, Cape Town and you see a promotional ad for a KFC Zinger Burger 200m away. That is way more relevant than a generic ad for a flight to Dubai.

During the course of providing relevant location-based ads we collect consent-based information such as the user's location and other data points. We collect between 5M and 8M raw observations every day, with the total raw observations on storage in excess of 1 billion.

This creates a need for us to develop appropriate data-focused solutions like identifying a user's home and work location, common social points-of-interest visit behaviour, time of day news reading habits, type of content being read and many more, in order to provide relevant and personalised user experiences.

The ideal candidate for this role

• You will:
• Build state-of-the-art statistical models
• Build segmentation and propensity models
• Build real time systems that integrate with the rest of our stack
• Build visualisations using R Shiny, DataStudio, Tableau or similar
• Brainstorm new ideas and concepts
• Work with teammates on design, and code reviews
•  We expect you to:
• Be creative
• Be flexible
• Think like an owner
• Maintain a high standard of work
• Minimum requirements:
• At least 3 years of data science experience
• Languages: R/RStudio, Python, MySQL
• Strong mathematical or statistical knowledge
• Strong data wrangling experience
• Additional requirements:
• Have an understanding of Hadoop, Hive and/or MapReduce
• Experience with distributed computing is advantageous: Spark
• Experience with Cloud services is advantageous: AWS, Google
• Experience in working in an Agile/Scrum development environment
• Knowledge of ad tech industry is advantageous

Benefits include:

• Flexi-hours: minimum on-site hours between 09:30 and 16:30
• Coffee
• Friday beers
• Foosball table and dart board
• No dress code