Consultant Team Lead - Financial Data Science

Opti-Num solutions have been innovating in the South African technology sector for almost 30 years. We collaborate with our clients, applying our innovative thinking and class-leading tools to develop meaningful solutions that allow our clients to make impactful, evidence-based, business decisions.

We’re looking for a leader who can join our team of data scientists and engineers to help design, develop, and deploy ground-breaking solutions for our clients. Your first project would be in support of one of our clients in the finance industry, designing and developing cutting edge financial models and algorithms, and the software infrastructure to support the running and governance of these models. You would work closely with your project team and senior staff at the client to conceptualise, implement and rollout business critical solutions. You will see how your efforts translate into impact in the real world.

What we’re offering

• Cross industry exposure – consult with, get advice from, and share your projects with colleagues from a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, mining, process engineering, automotive, property, and financial industries. We have a culture that encourages knowledge transfer through project shares and code and design reviews at all levels.
• Endless learning opportunities – from coding dojos, a data science club, and internal training courses, to funding for external courses and further studies.
• Flexible hybrid working conditions – we support working remotely, but our well-equipped offices with a great atmosphere are available for those days when you wake up in the mood for office environment.
• Mentorship – receive mentorship and guidance from seniors, and have the opportunity to mentor others on the team.
• Employee value proposition – Opti-Num contributes to your provident fund, life cover and even gives you an extra day off in your birthday month! We love having the occasional team outing to have fun as a team – some favourites have been racing go-carts, riding quadbikes, walking around a park or simply having a good lunch together.

What we’re looking for

• Ability to lead projects and people – it is essential to understand the overall objectives and “big picture” of our client and ensure that the project team is executing according to this vision, growing skills and delivering value through quality results simultaneously.
• Ability to engage with clients – the most exciting technical challenges are those that no one has ever done before. These need deep engaging conversations to uncover the problem and discover the business requirements collaboratively with the client.
• Strong software engineering skills – we require experience with object-oriented programming, knowledge of design patterns, understanding of automated unit testing, and hands on experience using Git to collaborate with a team. You would also support with integration and deployment into the client’s production systems.
• Driven and self-managing – you should be able to manage your own time and objectives. You should be able to monitor your own project success by evaluating implementation progress against milestones and budget usage, and manage scope creep and change control.
• An eye for detail – you need to be someone who likes to dig into the “Why?”. When you see an interesting or unusual result, we’d like you to be someone who notices and stops to think about it. The most exciting work we do comes from noticing something in the data that doesn’t make sense at first.
• Programming experience – we’re looking for a minimum of 3 years industry experience writing object-oriented code in MATLAB, Python, or a similar language. Experience with SQL is a huge plus.
• Interest in Finance – Interest in the finance industry, and a basic knowledge of the banking industry would be beneficial.
• Education - Bachelor’s degree in a STEM field. The work we do requires an understanding of linear algebra, so a strong focus on mathematics is essential, minimum to 2nd year, but preferably up to a 3rd year level. We’re looking for qualifications such as mechanical, electrical, chemical or computer engineering, physics, computer science, mathematics, computational and applied maths, statistics, actuarial sciences, financial engineering, or financial mathematics. A Master’s degree or interest in pursuing a Master’s degree is great (we can help you with this).

Interview process

If your application passes our initial screening, you will enter our interview process, which consists of up to two interviews. The first interview is conversational, and we will ask questions around your interests, skills, and experience. Following this, you may be given a take-home task, which will involve coding a small problem which you would have to present back to us during the second interview, first as if we were clients wanting to see insights (for 15 minutes), and then as if we were colleagues in the form of a code review (for 15 minutes).