Data Scientist (AI-Native) — Growth & Credit Location: Nairobi, Kenya (in-office) About Umba Umba is a pan-African digital bank operating in Kenya and Nigeria, with a mission to make financial services more accessible, affordable, and empowering for millions of people across Africa. We're transforming how banking works on the continent by building intelligent, automated financial products powered by machine learning. Our platform offers digital banking, lending, and payments through Android, iOS, and Web applications, serving both individuals and businesses at scale. Headquartered in Nairobi, Umba acquired a licensed deposit-taking microfinance bank in 2023 and has since grown revenue more than sixfold. We're looking for exceptional people who share our ambition, energy, and belief that technology can unlock financial freedom. Join us as we build Africa's leading digital bank.
About
the Role We're hiring a Data Scientist to own the two models that decide whether Umba grows profitably: how we acquire customers, and how we underwrite them. On the credit side, you'll build and continuously improve the scoring systems that decide who we lend to and on what terms — drawing on bank statement data, payments history, CRB (Credit Reference Bureau) data, and the behavioural signals we collect across our app. The same scoring stack needs to serve both digitally acquired customers and the customers our sales team brings in for underwriting, so you'll design for both flows. On the growth side, you'll optimize how we spend marketing budget to acquire those customers — ad targeting, funnel conversion, channel attribution, and the experiments that tell us which levers actually move CAC and LTV. You'll own the loop from "who do we target" through "did they convert" through "did they repay." This is not a traditional data science role. We operate in an AI-native environment, where
the team leverages Claude Code, Codex, and other LLMbased systems to accelerate analysis, generate model code, build pipelines, and iterate quickly. As a result,
the role increasingly focuses on: Defining clear problem specs that AI agents can execute against Reviewing, validating, and hardening AI-generated analyses and code Building feedback loops that let models improve automatically with new data Setting the quality bar — what "good" looks like for a model in production You'll collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, and the Sales team to ship models that affect lending decisions on day one. This is a highly technical, in-office role in Nairobi. You'll join a small, high-performing team where ownership is expected and impact is immediate.
Responsibilities Credit & underwriting Build, deploy, and continuously improve credit scoring models using bank statement data, payment histories, CRB pulls, and in-app behavioural signals Design automated underwriting flows that serve both digitally acquired customers and salessourced applications Implement model retraining pipelines so scoring improves as we accumulate repayment outcomess - not as a quarterly project Own model performance monitoring, drift detection, and automated alerting Partner with Risk and Operations on policy thresholds, override rules, and the human-in-the-loop processes that wrap the models Growth & marketing analytics Optimize ad targeting across our acquisition channels — audience selection, bid strategy, creative performance, lookalike construction Instrument and analyze the acquisition funnel end-to-end (impression → click → install → KYC → first loan → repayment) Design and run A/B tests on acquisition and product experiences; build the experimentation infrastructure so
the team can run tests without you Build attribution and LTV/CAC models that the business can actually act on Cross-cutting Write clear technical specs that AI-assisted workflows can execute against Use AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) to move 10x faster on data wrangling, feature engineering, and analysis — while rigorously validating outputs Extend our data platform with new sources (third-party APIs, CRB providers, payment rails) when a model needs them Process, clean, and verify data integrity — especially for anything that touches lending decisions Present findings clearly to non-technical stakeholders; defend recommendations with data Skills and
Qualifications 4+ years of hands-on data science / applied ML in production environments Strong Python (pandas, scikit-learn, numpy) and SQL — you can go from raw data to deployed model without waiting on engineering Deep practical experience with classifier and regression modeling — feature engineering, model selection, calibration, evaluation under class imbalance Solid applied statistics: hypothesis testing, regression, experimental design, dealing with selection bias and censored outcomes Experience working with messy real-world financial data (transactional data, bank statements, payments, credit bureau data) — or strong evidence you can ramp on it quickly Comfort with relational databases (Postgres / MySQL) and modern data tools Strong written and verbal communication — you can explain a model's behaviour to a credit officer, a marketer, and an engineer in the same week Highly preferred Credit scoring or fraud modeling experience, especially in emerging markets or thin-file populations Marketing analytics / growth experimentation experience — ad platforms (Meta, Google), attribution, funnel analysis Production ML experience: deployment, monitoring, retraining pipelines AI-Native Data Science (increasingly important) Experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, etc.) in daily analysis and modeling workflows Ability to write clear, structured technical specs and prompts that produce reliable code and analyses Strong review skills — you can spot the subtle bugs in AI-generated SQL, features, and pipelines that pass tests but produce wrong answers Understanding of failure modes in AI-assisted analysis (leakage, hallucinated joins, plausible-butwrong feature definitions)
Bonus Experience with payments, lending, or fintech in Kenya / Africa specifically Familiarity with CRB data (Metropol, TransUnion, CreditInfo) and Kenyan banking data formats Experience deploying LLM-based features into production data products What We're Really Looking For Data scientists who think in systems and feedback loops, not one-off models People who can leverage AI to ship 10x faster without losing rigour Builders who own a problem from data → model → deployment → monitoring Pragmatic operators who would rather ship a working v1 this month than a perfect v3 next year Work Status Valid work authorization for Kenya. Umba is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal
requirements. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.
