Data Scientist

John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH) is Sri Lanka’s largest listed conglomerate in the Colombo Stock Exchange. From managing hotels and resorts in Sri Lanka and the Maldives to providing port, marine fuel and logistics services to IT solutions, manufacturing of food and beverages to running a chain of supermarkets, tea broking to stock broking, life insurance and banking to real estate, we have made our presence felt in virtually every major sphere of the economy.

Our business built over 150 years touches nearly every major sector of the economy. We generate a significant quantum of data, and we intend to use it to build the future of our businesses. Our Digital and Analytics insights can positively disrupt life for all Sri Lankans and our commitment to passion and excellence will help to deliver superior value to customers, our people, and the community.

OCTAVE is the cornerstone of our data-driven strategic and operational decisions!

Team OCTAVE solves JKH’s most intractable problems across industry verticals by building pipelines using Python and Azure data factory to work on one of the country’s richest data lakes, building and implementing complex machine learning algorithms that will impact millions of Sri Lankans.

Role Description

The Data Scientist will work as a core member of advanced analytics project delivery teams within Octave. This person will be responsible for conducting simple to complex statistical analyses using large datasets. They will be involved in building and improving advanced statistical and machine learning models. They will also work closely with an integrated analytics team including data engineers, machine learning engineers, business intelligence engineers and delivery associates.

Key Responsibilities:

• Perform advanced statistical analyses to extract actionable insights, identify trends, and evaluate business performance.
• Design and implement predictive and descriptive models using supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques.
• Design and implement experimental and non-experimental methods to measure the impact and value of model-driven intervention.
• Collaborate with data scientists, data engineers, business intelligence engineers, and analytics delivery associates to develop, test, and deploy end-to-end analytical solutions.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation of models, codebases, assumptions, and workflows to ensure reproducibility and transparency.
• Participate in collaborative development practices, including code reviews, knowledge sharing, and structured problem-solving sessions.
• Clearly communicate analytical findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning by researching industry best practices, contributing to shared knowledge, and driving innovation in problem-solving approaches.

Skills and Competencies:

Required skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, Mathematics or a related field.
• Proficiency in Python programming.
• Minium of 1-3 years of experience.
• A sound understanding of statistics and probability theory fundamentals.
• Familiarity with machine learning methods and popular data science libraries (e.g., NumPy, scikit-learn) is a strong plus.

Managerial skills

• Ability to work well in agile environments in diverse teams with multiple stakeholders.
• Strong drive to learn and good organizational skills.
• Ability to effectively communicate complex analytical and technical content.

Mindset & Behavior

• High energy and passionate individual who can work closely with other team members
• Strong entrepreneurial drive to test new out of the box techniques
• Able to prioritize workstreams and adopt an agile approach
• Willing to adopt an iterative approach; and experimental mindset to drive innovation

Want to learn more about Octave? Check out https://www.keells.com/octave/