About Us

Player First Ltd. (PFL) is a socially motivated technology business and subsidiary of Shujaaz Inc.’s social venture network based in Nairobi, Kenya. Together, we have built the region’s largest youth brand, Shujaaz, reaching 5.6m young Kenyans with behaviour-change-focused media aimed at removing barriers facing young micro entrepreneurs within Africa’s informal sector. Our combined decade of experience on youth focused insights has driven the development of our innovative and ambitious new offer, aiming to harness technology opportunities and the power of big-data to provide skills, networks, products, and services that unlock value and drive growth for Africa’s informal sector micro-entrepreneurs.

In July 2020, we launched a prototype of our flagship digital platform. In 2021, we will build on feedback from active users on the platform, launch key and exciting new products and features, drive continued back-end development and continue rolling out solutions to a wider selection of our audience.

Additionally, we are working on launching key products within the platform including digital learning courses, mentorship opportunities and a lending product in partnership with financial sector partners to match users with services. Our funding runway is supported by large social impact investors focused on livelihoods and informal micro entrepreneurship programs, large grant making institutions who partnered on our initial pilot and continue to work with us as well as strategic venture capital financiers offering technical expertise.

About the Role

Reporting to the Managing Director, this role driven by passion for data, analytics, insights and technology will be responsible for lighting up actionable insights that drive key business decisions for the company. The Data Scientist will play a key role in providing data and analytics for the company and own the end-to-end decision sciences charter that includes:

• Bringing relevant data into a central system to create the single version of truth
• Opportunity analysis and hypothesis generation for stages throughout the end-to-end customer lifecycle
• Building advanced analytical models (behavior segmentation, churn prediction etc.) that spans marketing and finance.
• Developing models that power recommendations to end users, admins, and partners.

Key responsibilities:

• Design, prototype, implement and test descriptive, predictive analytics, forecasting, and causal inference models
• Architect and develop operational models that run at scale
• Partner with teams to identify and explore opportunities for the application of machine learning and predictive analysis
• Communicate with technical and non-technical audiences, and contribute modeling expertise as a team player To be successful in this role you must be driven, self-directed, entrepreneurial, and focused on delivering the right results. You also need to have strong skills in written and oral communication, a can-do attitude, and the willingness to tackle hard problems in innovative ways. You must also thrive in a team environment that values cross team collaboration and building on the success of others. Qualifications and skills
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Statistics/Economics/Math/Computer Science or related field
• Experience in SQL, R, Python to implement statistical models, machine learning, and analysis (Recommenders, Prediction, Classification, Clustering, etc.) in big data environment
• Experience on large scale computing systems like COSMOS, Hadoop, MapReduce and/or similar systems preferred
• Experience with programming skills, e.g. Java, C# is a plus
• Familiarity with deep learning toolkits, e.g. CNTK, TensorFlow, etc. is a plus
• Experience with implementing azure machine learning models is a plus  Strong written and verbal communication to educate and work with cross functional teams
• Be self-driven, and show ability to deliver on ambiguous projects with incomplete or dirty data

Shujaazinc is an equal opportunity employer.