Job Openings at Umba

Job Summary:

• To lead the growth of the trade finance and export business by driving client acquisition, structuring competitive export financing solutions, mobilizing deposits, and ensuring portfolio quality and regulatory compliance.

Responsibilities:

 Client Acquisition & Export Growth

• Identify, source, onboard, and manage relationships with exporters across key sectors.
• Drive acquisition and activation of export/FX clients in line with business targets.
• Ensure optimal utilisation of approved trade limits.

Trade Finance Structuring & Revenue Generation

• Lead structuring and execution of trade finance solutions including invoice financing, guarantees, LPO financing, and FX solutions.
• Deliver trade finance income targets across performance bonds, bid bonds, advance/performance guarantees, and LPO financing.
• Drive FX transaction volumes and optimise yield per transaction.

Deposits Mobilisation & Transactional Banking

• Mobilise deposits from export clients to support liquidity and funding objectives.
• Grow low-cost deposits (CASA) within the trade portfolio.
• Optimise cost of funds on trade-related deposits.
• Increase fee income from transactional banking (FX, guarantees, trade flows).

Portfolio Quality & Risk Management

• Maintain portfolio quality within acceptable thresholds.
• Ensure early identification and resolution of arrears.
• Uphold high standards in credit structuring, monitoring, and reporting.
• Ensure full compliance with CBK regulations and internal credit policies.

Market Intelligence & Strategy

• Provide insights on exporter needs, industry trends, and competitor offerings.
• Identify opportunities to enhance product-market fit and competitiveness.

Team Leadership & Performance Management

• Lead and manage the trade finance/export team to achieve targets.
• Drive staff productivity (business per person).
• Conduct performance reviews, coaching, and capability development.
• Maintain acceptable attrition levels and build a strong succession pipeline.
• Ensure compliance with leave and HR policies.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Business, Economics, or a related field
• Master’s degree or professional certification (CPA, CFA, ACCA) is an added advantage
• Minimum 7–10 years’ experience in trade finance, corporate banking, or export finance
• Proven track record in structuring trade finance deals and managing client portfolios
• Strong understanding of FX markets, trade products, and regulatory requirements

Skills & Competencies

• Strong deal structuring and analytical capability
• In-depth knowledge of trade finance products and export ecosystems
• Business development and relationship management skills
• Risk assessment and portfolio management capability
• Strong understanding of regulatory and compliance requirements
• Strategic thinking and execution ability
• Leadership and team management skills
• High level of commercial acumen and results orientation

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About the Role

• We're hiring a Data Scientist to own the two models that decide whether Umba grows profitably: how weacquire customers, and how we underwrite them.On the credit side, you'll build and continuously improve the scoring systems that decide who we lend to andon what terms — drawing on bank statement data, payments history, CRB (Credit Reference Bureau) data,and the behavioural signals we collect across our app. The same scoring stack needs to serve both digitally acquired customers and the customers our sales team brings in for underwriting, so you'll design for both flows.
• On the growth side, you'll optimize how we spend marketing budget to acquire those customers — ad targeting, funnel conversion, channel attribution, and the experiments that tell us which levers actually move CAC and LTV. You'll own the loop from "who do we target" through "did they convert" through "did they repay."

This is not a traditional data science role.

We operate in an AI-native environment, where the team leverages Claude Code, Codex, and other LLMbased systems to accelerate analysis, generate model code, build pipelines, and iterate quickly. As a result,the role increasingly focuses on:

• Defining clear problem specs that AI agents can execute against
• Reviewing, validating, and hardening AI-generated analyses and code
• Building feedback loops that let models improve automatically with new data
• Setting the quality bar — what "good" looks like for a model in production
• You'll collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, and the Sales team to ship models that affect lending
• decisions on day one. This is a highly technical, in-office role in Nairobi. You'll join a small, high-performing
• team where ownership is expected and impact is immediate.

Responsibilities
Credit & underwriting

• Build, deploy, and continuously improve credit scoring models using bank statement data, payment
• histories, CRB pulls, and in-app behavioural signals
• Design automated underwriting flows that serve both digitally acquired customers and salessourced applications
• Implement model retraining pipelines so scoring improves as we accumulate repayment outcomess - not as a quarterly project
• Own model performance monitoring, drift detection, and automated alerting
• Partner with Risk and Operations on policy thresholds, override rules, and the human-in-the-loop processes that wrap the models

Growth & marketing analytics

• Optimize ad targeting across our acquisition channels — audience selection, bid strategy, creative performance, lookalike construction
• Instrument and analyze the acquisition funnel end-to-end (impression → click → install → KYC → first loan → repayment)
• Design and run A/B tests on acquisition and product experiences; build the experimentation infrastructure so the team can run tests without you
• Build attribution and LTV/CAC models that the business can actually act on Cross-cutting
• Write clear technical specs that AI-assisted workflows can execute against
• Use AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) to move 10x faster on data wrangling, feature engineering, and analysis — while rigorously validating outputs
• Extend our data platform with new sources (third-party APIs, CRB providers, payment rails) when a model needs them
• Process, clean, and verify data integrity — especially for anything that touches lending decisions
• Present findings clearly to non-technical stakeholders; defend recommendations with data

Skills and Qualifications

• 4+ years of hands-on data science / applied ML in production environments
• Strong Python (pandas, scikit-learn, numpy) and SQL — you can go from raw data to deployed model without waiting on engineering
• Deep practical experience with classifier and regression modeling — feature engineering, model selection, calibration, evaluation under class imbalance
• Solid applied statistics: hypothesis testing, regression, experimental design, dealing with selection bias and censored outcomes
• Experience working with messy real-world financial data (transactional data, bank statements, payments, credit bureau data) — or strong evidence you can ramp on it quickly
• Comfort with relational databases (Postgres / MySQL) and modern data tools
• Strong written and verbal communication — you can explain a model's behaviour to a credit officer, a marketer, and an engineer in the same week

Highly preferred

• Credit scoring or fraud modeling experience, especially in emerging markets or thin-file populations
• Marketing analytics / growth experimentation experience — ad platforms (Meta, Google), attribution,
• funnel analysis
• Production ML experience: deployment, monitoring, retraining pipelines
• AI-Native Data Science (increasingly important)
• Experience using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, etc.) in daily analysis and
• modeling workflows
• Ability to write clear, structured technical specs and prompts that produce reliable code and
• analyses
• Strong review skills — you can spot the subtle bugs in AI-generated SQL, features, and pipelines
• that pass tests but produce wrong answers
• Understanding of failure modes in AI-assisted analysis (leakage, hallucinated joins, plausible-butwrong feature definitions)

Bonus

• Experience with payments, lending, or fintech in Kenya / Africa specifically
• Familiarity with CRB data (Metropol, TransUnion, CreditInfo) and Kenyan banking data formats
• Experience deploying LLM-based features into production data products

What We're Really Looking For

• Data scientists who think in systems and feedback loops, not one-off models
• People who can leverage AI to ship 10x faster without losing rigour
• Builders who own a problem from data → model → deployment → monitoring
• Pragmatic operators who would rather ship a working v1 this month than a perfect v3 next year