Machine Learning Engineer

Company

Kora is the marketplace for everything payments. We offer a robust payment API for payment collections, disbursements, and conversions for businesses anywhere in Africa.

Role Summary

We run payments across Africa and are now positioned as a global fiat and stablecoin payment infrastructure. We offer mobile money, virtual bank accounts, and virtual cards for payins and payouts across multiple markets. Our data infrastructure is batch-first (Airflow + a cloud data warehouse) and we use Vertex AI for our MLOps lifecycle. The ML team is high-ownership: you will build models, design systems, ship them, and observe them in production.

You will work on merchant-facing intelligence: forecasting, anomaly detection, segmentation, as well as automation and product-layer ML. If you want to build practical things that matter in a context that most ML engineers never get near, this is the role.

What You'll Work On

• Design and ship a per-merchant payment volume forecasting system: time-series decomposition, Africa-specific event calendars (salary cycles, MNO maintenance windows, public holidays), quantile regression for uncertainty bounds
• Build and maintain fraud/anomaly detection across the payment stack (residual-based and model-driven) with tiered alerting logic mapped to merchant risk profiles.
• Own the dynamic merchant segmentation system end-to-end: rule-based and data-driven hybrid, percentile thresholds grounded in EDA, segment-transition features as ML inputs
• Instrument and monitor deployed models: drift detection, retraining triggers, and evaluation pipelines via Vertex AI
• Build automation tooling that sits alongside the core ML work: Airflow DAGs, pipeline scaffolding, and tooling to reduce operational toil
• Contribute to product and strategic thinking.