Head of Data

Who We Are

_able is transforming financial services in emerging markets with its best-in-class Digital Banking Platform. We help partners launch financial products by embedding them into digital channels their customers already use.

The foundation of the platform is grounded in data and informs everything we do: from credit scoring to marketing segmentation and everything in between. Building on this strong foundation, we’ve structured the platform around three key layers:

• API Integration Layer: Seamless connectivity for partners to integrate core systems.
• Module Layer: Flexible, customizable components tailored to partner needs.
• Services Layer: Expertise to manage financial products, including portfolio management, scoring, and communications.

This approach enables us to embed credit and savings products into any partner channel, making them easy to access and highly contextual. The benefit is that our platform can cater to a wide range of use cases:

• MNOs can deploy efficient loan and savings systems optimized for their channels.
• Fintechs can offer tailored financial services to their unique customer base.
• Banks can create new revenue streams and enhance customer loyalty without overhauling their core systems.

The result is a win-win-win for partners, customers, and _able. Having deployed across multiple markets in Africa, we’ve proven our platform meets a critical need and is driving us toward our core objectives:

1. Democratizing financial services by reaching over 500 million people.
2. Becoming the most trusted source of data in emerging markets.

The Role

As Head of Data, you will own and evolve _able’s end-to-end data and AI platform, transforming data into production-grade intelligence, automated decisioning, and self-learning systems that power credit, payments, and embedded financial products.

You will lead how _able collects, stores, processes, and activates data at scale, while building and managing a high-performing data organization. This role is central to establishing _able’s long-term competitive advantage by delivering scalable, production-grade data and AI capabilities that compound in value over time.

_able’s next phase of growth is driven by a scalable Data & AI Platform that transforms data into predictive intelligence, automated decisioning, and long-term competitive advantage.

As Head of Data, you will own and evolve this platform end-to-end across three core layers:

• Foundations — trusted, scalable, and regulated data infrastructure that ensures reliability, security, and compliance
• Data Intelligence — production-grade predictive models embedded directly into credit, pricing, customer engagement, and portfolio management
• Learning Engine — self-learning systems that improve continuously, compounding value with every transaction, customer, and partner

This platform powers _able’s products today and, over time, becomes a durable intelligence moat that strengthens performance, scale, and defensibility across markets.

Position title: Head of Data

Reports to: CEO

Coverage: UAE (HQ), Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda + other new markets

Base: The Oval, Parklands, Nairobi, Kenya

Travel: Required
 

Key Responsibilities

Strategic & Leadership

• Define and own _able’s data and AI vision, strategy, and operating models — including the evolution from rules-based systems to ML-driven and self-learning decisioning platforms.
• Lead and grow a cross-functional data team (data engineers, data analysts/scientists, data architects, machine learning engineers, BI analysts) — through hiring, mentoring, and performance management.
• Instill a high-performance culture across the data organization — driving speed, accountability, clarity of ownership, delivery discipline, and strong execution across data engineering, analytics, and data science while actively managing cross-functional dependencies and team dynamics.
• Own performance outcomes where data and AI directly drive revenue, credit risk, portfolio performance, automation, and capital efficiency.
• Collaborate with senior leadership and stakeholders across product, risk, operations, finance, compliance, growth — translating business needs into data requirements and insights. 
• Drive organisation-wide behavioural change toward data-led execution, embedding analytics, experimentation, and measurable performance into how product, risk, operations, and growth teams operate daily.
• Continuously evaluate emerging research, AI techniques, and modelling approaches — translating innovation into compliant, production-grade, scalable systems.
• Establish and run a formal data operating cadence (delivery tracking, model performance reviews, portfolio analytics reviews, platform health metrics) with executive leadership and core business units.

Data Infrastructure & Architecture

• Design, build and maintain scalable, robust data architecture and pipelines capable of ingesting and processing structured and unstructured data (e.g. from partner institutions, transaction data, credit scoring inputs, customer behaviour, operational logs).
• Ensure data quality, reliability, security, and compliance across all pipelines and platforms.
• Oversee data storage, ETL/ELT, warehousing/data-lake, and enable efficient retrieval for analytics and decision-making. 
• Own the reliability, completeness, and operational integrity of end-to-end data pipelines — from ingestion through transformation to analytics and model consumption in live production environments.
• Ownership of data platform cost efficiency across compute, storage, vendor spend.

Analytics, Insights & Data Products

• Enable data-driven decision-making: maintain analytics, BI dashboards, reports, self-serve data tools for stakeholders across the business (product performance, risk pricing, credit underwriting, customer behaviour, growth metrics, operational KPIs) 
• Partner with risk and credit-scoring teams to support real-time risk assessments — ensuring data pipelines and models feed into credit risk pricing, underwriting and scoring systems.
• Own the full model lifecycle cadence — including performance monitoring, feature drift detection, retraining strategies, validation cycles, and continuous improvement of production scoring systems.
• Drive the transition from descriptive analytics to predictive and prescriptive intelligence — embedding models directly into live product, risk, and operational workflows.

Data Governance, Compliance & Best Practices

• Establish and enforce data governance policies: data definitions, data lineage, metadata standards, version control, data security and access management. 
• Ensure compliance with relevant data protection/privacy regulations or jurisdictional requirements (especially when operating across multiple emerging markets) — make data practices auditable, secure, and ethical.
• Establish and maintain a clear, auditable source-of-truth framework across all critical datasets, ensuring transparency, lineage, documentation standards, and confidence in reporting used by product, risk, finance, and external partners.
• Ensure ongoing regulatory-grade reporting for banks and partners, including model performance, audit trails, data provenance, and compliance with lending and risk governance expectations.

Person Specification

Required

• Strong technical background: degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or similar. Extensive experience working with big data, ETL/ELT, data warehousing, data lakes, structured & unstructured data. 
• Demonstrable experience leading a data or analytics team — hiring/mentoring, setting data strategy, delivering data infrastructure and analytics at scale. 
• Deep understanding of data architecture and data modelling practices; familiarity with data engineering tools and technologies, cloud data platforms, and best practices for scalable, maintainable data pipelines. 
• Strong business acumen — ability to link data insights to product performance, credit/risk pricing, financial metrics, and strategic growth initiatives.
• 8+ years’ experience in data engineering, analytics, data architecture, and/or ML/AI, with demonstrated ownership of production-grade models and data platforms used in real-time decisioning systems.
• Expertise with modern data platforms and technologies (e.g., Spark, Kafka, Airflow, DBT, Snowflake/BigQuery/Redshift, Databricks, Python, SQL).
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management — capable of translating technical data concepts into actionable business insights for non-technical teams and senior leadership. 
• Deep, hands-on expertise in building predictive models that drive product and operational decisioning based on customer behavior.
• Demonstrated experience implementing data governance, security frameworks, audits, and regulatory compliance across multi-market operations.
• High degree of curiosity, analytical mindset, attention to detail, plus a proactive approach to data governance, compliance, and ethical data use. 

Desired (Not Mandatory)

• Previous experience in fintech, digital banking, embedded finance, or working with credit risk/credit scoring models.
• Familiarity with regulatory or compliance frameworks relevant to financial services in emerging markets.
• Experience in multi-region / cross-border data operations dealing with multiple regulatory environments.
• Demonstrated ability to operationalize research-driven innovation within regulated financial environments.

What You’ll Achieve

• Build and own the data backbone of a fast-growing fintech infrastructure business — shaping how _able uses data to deliver embedded financial services at scale.
• Enable smarter, automated risk and credit-scoring engines, powering better financial inclusion and scalable credit/savings/payment solutions for underbanked communities in emerging markets.
• Directly influence portfolio performance, credit losses, pricing accuracy, and capital deployment through data-driven risk, scoring, and analytics systems.
• Empower product, operations, risk, finance, and growth teams with reliable analytics to make data-driven decisions.
• Create and scale a high-performing data team, build a culture of data excellence, and ensure governance and regulatory compliance across markets.
• Build a scalable, AI-driven data platform that compounds over time — creating a defensible intelligence moat that strengthens _able’s products, partnerships, and market leadership.

Culture

At _able, we are a fast-paced, high-performing team driven by a shared passion for building the future of banking and democratising access to finance across emerging markets. Our team operates across offices in Dubai, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Maputo, and Porto, with frequent travel to strengthen connections with colleagues and partners.

We value the impact of working together in person, believing it often delivers results that remote work cannot fully achieve. While work-from-home (WFH) is available for specific requests or situations, our culture emphasises the advantages of being physically present and engaged as a team.

We are entering an exciting phase of hyper-growth, expanding into new markets, scaling operations, and evolving our structures to shape the future of _able in 2026. We are looking for energetic, curious individuals who are passionate about our vision and eager to create value while driving innovation and growth in the markets we operate in. 

We’re thrilled to have you join us as we reshape the financial landscape in emerging markets.

Benefits

• Health Insurance for you and your direct dependants
• Group Bonus Policy
• Long-Term Incentive Plan (LTIP)
• Mental Health and Wellbeing Platform
• Learning & Development Opportunities (Internal and External)