Data Scientist

Discovery Health

Data Scientist: Health & Wellness 

About Discovery

Discovery's core purpose is to enhance and protect people's lives through products and services that use incentives, behavioural science, and data to encourage healthier choices. This creates better outcomes for members, lower claims, and shared value for clients and society.

Discovery has one of the most diverse data assets in financial services and healthcare in the world, spanning health, wellness, lifestyle, driving, investments, and life insurance. This creates a unique opportunity to use advanced analytics, causal inference, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to improve member outcomes, strengthen operational performance, and support more personalised products and services.

About the Data Science Lab

The Data Science Lab (DS Lab) is a specialist team that solves high-impact problems across Discovery Health, Discovery Vitality, and the broader Discovery Group. Using large-scale structured and unstructured data, the team develops models, experiments, decision systems, and AI-enabled solutions that create measurable business and member value, like the Personal Health Pathways and Sleep Rewards programmes.

The DS Lab partners with teams across Discovery and organisations such as Google, Quantium Health, and world-renowned tertiary institutions to advance personalisation, causal inference, optimisation, generative AI and responsible AI adoption. The team contributes to scalable AI capabilities across Discovery, Vitality UK, USA and international partner markets, while maintaining a strong focus on governance, measurement, privacy, safety and practical business adoption.

The Opportunity

We are looking for an exceptional data science manager/specialist who enjoys solving ambiguous, high-impact problems and turning ideas into real-world solutions. This role is suited to someone who combines strong technical depth with business curiosity and the ability to independently drive meaningful projects from concept to implementation.

You will have the opportunity to:

• Build machine learning, causal inference, optimisation, and AI solutions that directly influence business and make people healthier.
• Design and measure experiments to understand the behavioural science behind what works, for whom, and why.
• Develop personalisation and decision systems using clinical, behavioural, operational, and digital data.
• Explore emerging AI capabilities and translate them into practical business applications.
• Work closely with senior stakeholders, product teams, engineers, researchers, and international partners.
• Help shape the future direction of Discovery's data science capabilities.

What We’re Looking For

Required

• Strong Python and SQL skills.
• Solid grounding in statistics, machine learning, experimentation, and model evaluation.
• Experience delivering data science solutions to solve real business problems.
• Ability to take ownership of complex analytical work with limited direction.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
• A bias toward action, learning, and execution.

Advantageous

• Experience with causal inference, optimisation, or personalisation.
• Experience with cloud-based data science workflows (preferably GCP).
• Experience in healthcare, insurance, behavioural science, or large-scale consumer products.

Education and Experience

• Honours, Master's, or PhD in a quantitative field such as Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Actuarial Science, Operations Research, Physics, Engineering, or similar.
• 3+ years of relevant data science experience.
• Evidence of exceptional analytical ability through industry experience, research, competitions, publications, or other notable achievements.

Personal Attributes 

We are particularly interested in people who are:

• Exceptionally curious.
• Intellectually honest and evidence-driven.
• Enthusiastic about helping people live healthier lives.
• Comfortable with ambiguity.
• Motivated by difficult problems and meaningful impact.
• Collaborative, humble, and low ego.
• Passionate about continuous learning and improvement.

EMPLOYMENT EQUITY   
                             
The Company’s approved Employment Equity Plan and Targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. As an Equal Opportunities employer, we actively encourage and welcome people with various disabilities to apply.