Do you have experience driving and productizing data-driven solutions for product offerings? Are you excited to apply modern data stack to crack complex and large-scale challenges? Do you love being at the forefront of data strategy and operations? Are you well-versed in data engineering and data science? Do you consider yourself to be a strong collaborator, with great communication skills?
Sounds like you, read on…
ABOUT US
In 2035, Africa will have the largest workforce in the world and will need to catalyse transformation by empowering its largest untapped resource – its people. Fuelled by this, the African Leadership Group is an ecosystem of institutions with a shared vision to harness Africa’s abundant human capital and transform the continent and the world by selecting, developing, and connecting 2 million young leaders to opportunities by 2030. ALG was founded over 15 years ago by Fred Swaniker, a serial entrepreneur recognised by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019. ALX and The Room are two brands of the African Leadership Group.
ALX is our training arm, focused on developing skills for the fourth industrial revolution (software engineering, devops, data science, etc.) to ensure that Africa is able to compete effectively as the world undergoes a digital transformation. To cement this, through our legal entity African Leadership International (ALI), we have signed an agreement to acquire Silicon Valley based Holberton Inc. – a project-based, college alternative educating the next generation of software engineers. This will give us ownership of the advanced technology program that will enable us to provide global organizations access to significant untapped pools of talent that can bridge the growing global shortage of technology talent. For more on this, please read this article here.
The Room our talent placement arm, is a community that our young talent join to access global work opportunities. To learn more about us, please read this article about why we launched The Room & this article about the impact of our development programs on African youth. View this pitch deck to see how we present ourselves to employers.
ABOUT THE DATA TEAM
Companies around the world are clamoring to find talent with skills in software engineering, data science, UX/UI design, software architecture, business intelligence, cyber security, cloud computing, Internet of Things, product management, and other skills that can enable the rapidly accelerating digital transformation. The Room is solving this challenge by creating a new supply of diverse, world-class technology talent and matching this talent to global companies that need it.
Our method is simple: (i) select the best emerging talent from the world’s largest pool of untapped talent: Africa (which will form 40% of the world’s population by the end of this century); (ii) rapidly train this talent to meet market demands and reduce the shortage of available technology talent and (iii) build a large-scale, B2B staffing business to outsource this talent to global companies.
This is where you come in – As we build our systems, we are looking for a strong data-oriented individual to spearhead our team’s data and modeling strategy and implementation. As our Head of Data, you will own and define how the business creates additional value through the utilization of our data assets.
You will be joining a team that has a fail fast, iterate often mentality. With a bold mission, we encourage autonomy, creativity, collaboration and experimentation. We seek those that have a beginners’ mindset, are lifelong learners, thrive in uncertain circumstances and uncharted territory, and have a deep passion for building meaningful ML powered products that will have a big impact on the African continent. Our team has a user-first mindset, finding joy in understanding the pain points of the customers and solving their problems using technology.
If you’re excited about working in a hyper-growth, fun and collaborative environment, this is a chance for you to have an impact on young African talent.
ABOUT THE ROLE
Your responsibilities will include:
- Leveraging data and team for maximum impact within our business context
- Owning and guiding the overall data strategy (instrumentation, collection, processing, storage, privacy, security, visualization, compliance)
- Owning and evolving the overall modeling strategy (defining, prioritization, productizing, integration, maintenance, responsible use)
- Attracting, growing, and retaining a team of world-class Data Scientists and Data Engineers
- Providing thought leadership in the areas of advanced data engineering and data science
- Developing and deploying a state-of-the-art data and intelligence platform that will serve as the foundation of ALX and The Room’s ability to solve data-driven problems and innovate novel product use-cases
- Quantifying data initiatives and their results with a focus on ROIs to report back to the business
- Setting standards for data security and trustworthiness across the organization and drive a culture of responsible use of data
- Working with leaders across Engineering, Learning, Product, Marketing and other teams to deliver data-driven solutions to address a growing range of problems including continuous user persona building, realtime opportunity matching, and user cohort identification
REQUIREMENTS
- Building and managing a medium-sized team of data engineers & data scientists
- Driving and productizing data-driven solutions for product offerings
- Working with product and business teams to deliver tangible and disproportionate value
- Deploying machine learning to solve real-world problems balancing resources and impact
- Developing and deploying solutions, and optimizing costs, on cloud services such as AWS
- Experience with data security protocols, access control, and security and privacy compliance frameworks like GDPR and its equivalents in other jurisdictions
- Good understanding of mathematics of machine learning and real-world modeling implementations
- Managing teams distributed across geographies and timezones
- Strong record on technical publications in top tier conferences and journals and experience drafting and applying for patents in various jurisdictions
- 15+ years of hands on industry experience
- Masters degree or higher in Computer Science/Applied Mathematics/Statistics OR Bachelors in Computer Science with a Masters in Management degree
YOU WILL LOVE THIS JOB IF..
- Humanity Centered: You believe in humanity’s ability to self-improve, and are passionate about leveraging technology, streamlined systems and data to solve human-centric problems
- Impact Creation Mindset: You seek to create lasting impact by solving problems that address systemic growth challenges
- Think Big: You have the ability to think in terms of ambitious goals that span years, not months
- Accountability: You have an “owner’s approach” to be able to deliver on minimal supervision
- Structure: You have the discipline to take audacious goals and break down years-long roadmaps into near term deliverables that provide value to business stakeholders
- Coaching: You enjoy educating your peers and business partners about what it means to be data-oriented and cultivating engineering best practices
We would like to remind you that this is a remote job, which means that you can work from anywhere in the world. However, we have a preference for a GMT to GMT +4 time zone.