Data Scientist - Digital Payments (Contract)

About the role

PayTech Group is hiring a Data Scientist for a 6-month on-site contract in Accra, Ghana, supporting a Ghana pilot project. The Data Scientist turns complex banking and payments data into practical insights, predictive models and customer segments, working closely with technical and business stakeholders to turn model outputs into implementation recommendations. Travel across West and Central Africa is required.

Key responsibilities

• Acquire, profile, clean and transform large transactional, customer and payments datasets.
• Develop and validate predictive, classification or propensity models for business and implementation use cases.
• Build customer segmentation approaches using transactional and behavioural indicators.
• Perform feature engineering, exploratory analysis and statistical validation, documenting assumptions and limitations.
• Create reproducible workflows and share findings through visualisations and stakeholder-ready summaries.
• Partner with engineering and integration teams on data inputs, quality checks and deployment requirements.
• Apply appropriate controls when handling sensitive banking and payments data.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, Business Administration, Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field (Master's preferred).
• Previous experience in banking, digital payment and card solutions or the FinTech industry.
• Experience in a fast-paced matrix organisation; willingness to travel across West and Central Africa may be relevant for later phases.
• Excellent English (French is an advantage).

Required skills

• Data science or advanced analytics in a transactional environment such as banking, payments or fintech.
• Python, SQL, pandas, scikit-learn, Jupyter, Power BI or Tableau, Git and cloud data platforms.
• Building and validating predictive, classification or segmentation models.
• Understanding of model evaluation, bias, overfitting, data quality and reproducibility.
• Preferred: payment transactions, card portfolios, digital banking, customer lifecycle analytics, MLOps, campaign measurement and experimentation.