Data Scientist

About the role

Girl Effect builds media and tech that adolescent girls in Africa and Asia want, trust, and need. Reaching over 50 million girls, the organization provides safe spaces to access crucial facts about health, education, and relationships, empowering them to redefine what is possible. We operate three chatbots in India, South Africa and Kenya which have reached nearly 3 million users, providing answers at scale to the most pressing questions related to sex health, mental wellbeing and livelihoods, whilst directing users to real world services. In the next 5 years, we intend to scale even further. By 2030, we believe we can reach 30 million girls through our chatbot solutions, providing highly personalised experiences augmented by Artificial Intelligence. The Tech & Evolution The Shift to GenAI: For over a decade, Girl Effect has leveraged user insights to build safer digital platforms. The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally transformed their product offerings. Current Scale: Our custom GenAI feature-which safely sits behind strict, custom guardrails-has already processed over 150,000 user submissions. Plans are underway to expand this feature to mixed-coded languages in South Africa, Kenya, and India. The Next Frontier: Girl Effect is moving from simple question-answering to creating complex, long-term conversational pathways such as Single Session Interventions (SSIs) for mental wellbeing. Our interactions are deeply rooted in behavioral science, designed to safely nudge vulnerable young users toward positive health outcomes. To find out more about our approach and work to date, read our Whitepaper and AI Ethical Guidelines The Technical Stack AI & Orchestration: Python-based services integrating GPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), and Claude (Anthropic). Infrastructure: Custom RAG pipeline, real-time performance metrics, and guardrails hosted on Azure. Channels: We deploy to WhatsApp, MoyaApp, Telegram, and custom web apps. Key Skills & Requirements You're a GenAI and LLM expert: You have hands-on, proven experience building with modern AI frameworks and models, using the elements described above in our technical stack. You possess a postgraduate degree in Data Science (or a similar field), are familiar with the full software development lifecycle, and can help to guide big architectural choices. You care deeply about user safety: Working with vulnerable youth means safety isn't an afterthought for you. You are passionate about building responsible AI, setting up rigorous evaluation metrics, and ensuring every chatbot interaction is accurate, secure, and helpful. You are an excellent collaborator and translator: You can seamlessly sit at the center of technical and non-technical worlds. You are comfortable talking code and setting standards with data scientists, whilst open to discussing impact and behavior change goals with subject matter experts in mental health, safeguarding, and evaluation to understand the use case. You can juggle and own: You have strong organizational skills and are able to prioritize a technical roadmap in an agile environment. You are ready to conduct code reviews, design experiments to prove the tech works, and represent the organization's data science vision at public events or partner meetings. You are mission-driven: Above all, you have a genuine passion for using technology to make a tangible, positive impact on the lives of young girls around the world.

Requirements

• Postgraduate degree in Data Science or a relevant discipline
• Strong technical acumen, able to guide decisions on digital platforms and tools.
• Understanding and experience of the software lifecycle
• Exceptional organizational and multitasking skills.
• Proven expertise in the application of LLM and GenAI technologies
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Ability to work collaboratively with staff at all levels of the organization
• A genuine passion for our mission and the positive impact we're making on the lives of girls.
• What Else You Should Know
• Girl Effect is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, colour, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender, or gender identity or expression. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.
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