↩ Work / EXPERIENCE

Head of Data.Employment

Period: Oct 2022 - Mar 2025
Company: GOZEM ↗

Owned the data function for Gozem's Sub-Saharan Africa group: governance, team scaling from 0 to 14+, FinOps, and fintech-grade analytics.

Built and mentored the data science and analytics team from 0 to 14+ across Sub-Saharan Africa, establishing data catalog practices and a domain-oriented data mesh strategy with domain leads.
Led FinOps initiatives delivering a 42.57% reduction in Google Cloud costs in a single quarter through data model redesign, BigQuery warehouse schema optimization, orchestration optimization, cost monitoring, and ETL/ELT pipeline tuning, while maintaining SLA on data freshness and integrity.
Led the development of ML-based fraud screening and financial transaction monitoring pipelines, reducing field agent payment processing time by 7x and delivering a Group Financial Closing Database for enterprise-wide performance monitoring.
Co-developed a domain-oriented data governance framework with the team, delivering a KPI framework with definitions, data source documentation, and table descriptions across the group.
Co-chartered the marketing analytics stack (CAC, LTV, cohort, and multi-touch attribution embedded into weekly Growth reviews), owning the end-to-end supporting data pipelines from campaign platforms.
Integrated analytics and ML features into mobile apps and internal platforms with Product and Business teams, including dynamic surge pricing for transportation and an extension of the agent incentive automation use case.

[•] PROJECTS & USE CASES

5 ENTRIES

Data team capacity expansion

Result 12 hires onboarded end-to-end from 50+ evaluated candidates, with 30/60/90-day ramp milestones.

Problem / Need

The data team capacity needed to scale across African operations to support growing operational and BI needs, requiring 2 senior hires alongside a data engineer owning pipelines and platform.

Solution

Authored the job scopes, technical requirements, and business cases justifying the senior hires to the leadership. Designed and ran technical interviews and assessments, evaluated 50+ candidates, negotiated offers end-to-end, and coordinated onboarding for 12 total hires with tooling access, team integration, and 30/60/90-day ramp milestones.

Tools

Team capacity planning·Hiring pipeline management·Team productivity tools·Candidate evaluation·Onboarding

Data science use-case knowledge base

Result 100+ use cases catalogued; top 15 adapted with Gozem-specific feasibility and impact assessments.

Problem / Need

The data team needed a curated reference of proven use cases to prioritize roadmaps, drawing inspiration from how Gojek, Grab, and Uber operate at scale and adapting to Gozem’s Sub-Saharan markets.

Solution

Catalogued 100+ use cases across demand forecasting, driver scoring, fraud detection, surge pricing, and route optimization. Selected the top 15 and adapted each with Gozem-specific feasibility, data availability, and applicability assessments. Defined success metrics, technical challenges, infrastructure requirements, and estimated business impact, structured as a living reference for the data and product teams.

Tools

Research & development·Market analysis·Use-case design·Proof of concept development

Ebanking analytics and reporting infrastructure

Result ~150 incidents surfaced per month; flagged a 20M+ CFA fraud; fintech warehouse powering regulatory reporting.

Problem / Need

Gozem Money (fintech vertical) needed real-time fraud monitoring, a fintech-grade data warehouse, and a reporting layer to support mobile payment operations and regulatory needs across African markets.

Solution

Designed and supervised deployment of a micro-batch processing pipeline monitoring anomalous patterns, fraud signals, and threshold breaches. The system surfaces ~150 incidents per month and flagged a major fraud worth 20M+ CFA. Built the fintech data warehouse for Togo operations, powered by ETL/ELT pipelines and data models as the foundational layer for financial analytics, regulatory submissions, and stakeholder dashboards (transaction volumes, product adoption, revenue, cohorts). Established data quality pipelines and documented data models, reporting glossary, and metric definitions.

Tools

Apache Airflow·Python·MongoDB·BigQuery·Dataflow·Cloud Storage

Self-service no-code data exploration platform

Result 12+ active manager users; routine query load on the central data team halved.

Problem / Need

Non-technical users across operations, finance, product, and customer support depended on the central data team for routine reporting and ad-hoc queries, creating a bottleneck.

Solution

Assessed data literacy and exploration needs across all Gozem markets. Coordinated configuration of a no-code query and exploration layer (Metabase) integrated with Gozem’s central data warehouse. Adoption reached 12+ active manager users, halving routine query volume on the central data team.

Tools

Metabase·BigQuery·Looker

Delivery agent incentive automation

Result Incentive-related ticket volume cut nearly in half; support disputes resolved within 24h.

Problem / Need

Delivery-agent positioning across high-demand zones was unmanaged, and incentive payments required manual finance intervention plus heavy customer-support load to resolve disputes.

Solution

Modeled demand by zone, time-of-day, and event type to identify underserved areas. Designed a performance framework (acceptance rate, completion rate, zone presence, quality scores) and end-to-end payment automation from incentive calculation through disbursement instructions. Built a justification database with pre-computed data points enabling support to resolve cases within 24h. Cut incentive-related ticket volume nearly in half through pre-emptive payment automation.

Tools

BigQuery·Python·Airflow·Google Sheets

← Work