Junior Data Scientist


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Pezesha, has created a holistic financial marketplace for MSMEs. By offering lending, financial education, and debt counselling to borrowers, plus a proprietary credit scoring system to vet MSMEs without a credit history, derisking lending to SMEs. Lower Risks bring commercial banks and capital providers onto Pezesha platform. As a collaborative structure, Pezesha is helping to tackle the $19 Billion financing gap for SMEs. Pezesha is led by a highly experienced and passionate local team with more than 10 years local and international experience in fin-tech, management of growth and technology companies, and unparalleled local market knowledge and reach.

Junior Data Scientist

Role Overview

  • As a Junior Data Scientist, you will support the Data Team in turning raw data into actionable insights that inform credit, product, operations, and business decisions. You will work on real business problems involving customer behavior, lending performance, transaction data, credit risk, and operational analytics. You will also have opportunities to contribute to machine learning and credit-scoring projects under the guidance of senior members of the team. The ideal candidate is curious, analytical, comfortable working with data, and eager to learn.

Core Responsibilities

Data Analysis & Reporting

  • Write SQL queries to extract, clean, transform and analyze data.
  • Support the preparation of recurring business and portfolio reports.
  • Conduct exploratory data analysis to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies.
  • Support data requests from Credit, Product, Operations, Finance, and other teams.
  • Help validate reported metrics and investigate discrepancies in data.

Credit  & Portfolio  Analytics

  • Conduct analysis of loan repayment and customer behavior.
  • Analyze lending metrics such as repayment rates, PAR, DPD, disbursements, collections, and portfolio performance.
  • Perform customer segmentation analysis. 
  • Support monitoring of credit risk indicators and model performance.
  • Contribute to credit scoring improvement ideas.

Insights & Reporting

  • Respond to data and analysis requests from cross-functional teams (Operations, Product, Finance, Credit).
  • Prepare weekly and monthly reports for internal stakeholders and external lenders, covering portfolio performance and borrower analytics.
  • Support ad-hoc data deep dives to identify performance trends, risks, or operational issues.

Model Experimentation Support

  • Work closely with senior data scientists to prepare datasets and conduct performance evaluations for machine learning and scorecard prototypes.
  • Participate in feature engineering, validation testing, and performance tracking of classification and credit scoring models.

Documentation & Best Practices

  • Maintain clear, up-to-date documentation for datasets, metrics definitions, SQL queries, ETL workflows, and dashboards.
  • Contribute to a shared knowledge base including SQL snippets, data dictionaries, and ETL logic to support collaboration and onboarding.
  • Follow and promote data quality, QA, and reproducibility best practices

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

  • Request SLA: ≥95% of internal data requests delivered within agreed timelines.
  • Dashboard Uptime & Quality: ≥99% uptime and accuracy for key operational dashboards.
  • Experimentation Support: Support and analyse at least 2 credit/product experiments per quarter.
  • SQL Query Reusability: Develop reusable templates for at least 3 core reporting use cases per quarter.
  • BI Tool Enhancement: Contribute to at least 1 new dashboard or major enhancement per quarter.
  • Documentation Coverage: 100% documentation for core queries, ETLs and reports owned.
  • Cross-Team Collaboration: Obtain positive feedback from at least 2 cross-functional teams per quarter.
  • Learning & Development: Demonstrate increasing independence in SQL, analytics and data science tasks.
  • Data Quality: Identify, document and proactively flag data issues encountered in day-to-day work.

Required Skills & Qualifications

  • Strong SQL proficiency (BigQuery experience preferred).
  • Experience with ETL pipelines and cloud-based data environments (GCP preferred).
  • Familiarity with BI tools (Superset or similar).
  • Basic understanding of credit risk, lending metrics, or financial data (strong advantage).
  • Exposure to strong R Programming and Python and data analysis libraries is a plus.
  • Strong attention to detail, data quality, and documentation.
  • Ability to work collaboratively across teams and manage multiple requests.

What Success Looks Like

  • Reliable, accurate data powering credit and operational decisions.
  • Dashboards and reports trusted by internal teams and external partners.
  • Consistent QA and documentation standards across data outputs.
  • Growing independence and contribution to credit analytics and experimentation.

Why Join Pezesha?

  • Be part of a mission-driven company enabling financial inclusion for MSMEs across Africa.
  • Work with a high-impact, data-driven team solving real-world financial challenges.
  • Opportunities for growth, leadership, and regional exposure in a fast-scaling fintech.
  • Competitive compensation and benefits package.
  • This person has to be based in Nairobi, Kenya

Method of Application

To apply, please send your CV and github link or work  to [email protected] with the subject line: REF 26 –Junior Data Scientist  

nairobi Kenya KEY RESPONSIBILITIES: MUST NOT BE MORE THAN 10 Determine the internal audit scope for assigned areas and develop risk-based audit plans aligned with the Bank's strategy, risk profile…