With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.
Job Summary
The Senior Machine Learning Engineer is accountable for designing, building, deploying, and operating machine learning solutions that deliver measurable business value across Absa’s pan‑African footprint. The role translates strategic priorities into scalable, secure, and responsible ML capabilities by partnering closely with various relevant stakeholders. Working within a strategic management operating model, the role ensures models and data pipelines are production‑ready, compliant, monitored, and continuously improved, enabling tech‑enabled decision‑making, digital product innovation, and a progressive, future‑fit Human Capital (HC) function.
Job Description
1) ML Solution Design and Delivery (End-to-End Engineering)
Design, build, and deploy machine learning models that improve prediction, classification, optimisation, or personalisation outcomes to deliver measurable business value.
Translate business requirements into ML system designs, defining features, modelling approaches, evaluation criteria, and integration patterns.
2) Strategic Alignment and Use-Case Shaping
Contribute to roadmap planning by sizing effort, dependencies, risks, and value, and by recommending fit-for-purpose ML approaches and tooling.
3) MLOps, Deployment, and Operational Excellence
Implement MLOps practices that enable consistent packaging, testing, release, and rollback of models using approved engineering and security standards.
Monitor and maintain the performance of deployed ML models, implementing updates and improvements based on drift detection, data analysis, and user feedback.
Build and operate model observability, including performance dashboards, alerting, lineage, and incident response runbooks to ensure service reliability.
5) Governance, Security, Privacy, and Responsible ML
Support data governance initiatives by ensuring ML pipelines, datasets, and outputs comply with data management policies, access controls, and retention requirements.
Implement model documentation, traceability, and validation controls that support model risk management, audit readiness, and regulatory expectations.
Embed responsible ML practices by testing for bias, fairness, explainability, robustness, and appropriate use, particularly for people and customer-impacting solutions.
6) Cross-Functional Collaboration and Product Enablement
Integrate with HC Services and HC Business Partnering teams to ensure ML solutions improve workforce decisions, employee experience, service efficiency, and change adoption.
7) Technical Enablement, Standards, and Capability Building
Stay informed about emerging technologies and best practices in ML engineering, MLOps, and data engineering, and apply them pragmatically to improve outcomes.
Contribute to playbooks, templates, and engineering guardrails that improve consistency, quality, and time-to-value across ML initiatives.
Qualifications & Experience
Education / Qualification
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
Postgraduate qualification (advantageous) in Machine Learning, Data Science, AI, or Software Engineering.
Relevant certifications (advantageous): Cloud ML/Engineering (e.g., Azure/AWS/GCP), data engineering, security, or Responsible AI.
Data pipeline engineering (SQL, orchestration concepts, distributed processing concepts, data quality checks).
Education
Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Statistics, Bachelor Honours Degree: Physical, Mathematical, Computer and Life Sciences
Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.
Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised
