Maisha Meds is seeking an expert in data analysis and engineering to manage our wonderful data team, manage our data pipelines, and create analysis for internal and external stakeholders.

Join Our Team

Maisha Meds is an organisation dedicated to improving health care in Africa. We began full-time operations in 2017 and over the past few years has grown to support over 4 million patient encounters at over 1,200 pharmacies and drug shops annually across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and Zambia.  We are building the financial and technology infrastructure to enable global health funders to pay for health outcomes at the last mile, with an initial focus on malaria case management.  Recent results from a randomised controlled trial with UC Berkeley showed that our programs lead to a statistically significant 350% increase in appropriate and high quality malaria care.  Based on these results, we are planning to scale the technology to reach over 10,000 health facilities and 20 million patients, and to directly pay for health outcomes for 1 million patients annually by 2024. In addition, we are actively building programs to support injectable contraceptives, HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, measles and HPV vaccines, malnutrition support, and safe water interventions.

Our work is funded by USAID Development Innovation Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, Pfizer, and others, and we are starting to build partnerships with multilateral global health funders, pharmaceutical companies, and national health insurance funds to have them pay us on a contract basis for health outcomes.  We use data from our point of sale software to design programs that leverage financial incentives to improve uptake of high impact health products.  And we measure our success by our ability to improve the quality and affordability of healthcare diagnosis, treatment, and prevention for low-income patients across Africa.

About the role

The data team is an important cross-functioning team at Maisha Meds. Over the past couple of years, the team has delivered on a range of projects from charting antibiotics usage across East Africa using diverse data sources to real time metrics of Maisha Meds’ internal programs and projects. We’re looking for a leader to guide the team and to execute on a variety of projects.  You will be using datasets that include internal transaction data on pharmacy transactions; publicly available data like maps, epidemiologic data, socioeconomic information; port-level data to understand market-level trends; and other proprietary data that may be linked with last-mile point of care data to provide a market level understanding of healthcare delivery in the region.

As Director of Data Science at Maisha Meds, you will be responsible for:

People and Team

• Manage a remote team of awesome data scientists
• Mentor individuals outside of the data team to help them improve their analytical skills

Data Analysis

• Manage relationships with different stakeholders ranging from external economics researchers and global health funders to internal operation teams
• Translate ambiguous stakeholder desires into concrete requirements and action plans (in some cases by serving as a product manager for dashboard creation)
• Create forecasts, models, and statistical analysis from unclean data sets
• Build visualizations using BI tools such as Metabase and Redash to clearly communicate findings

Our preferred candidate would have experience in either Data Engineering or Experiment Design and Analysis (both not required)

Data Engineering

• Maintain data pipeline that aggregates data from various sources to our Snowflake data warehouse
• Keep our BI tools in good function by regularly performing upgrades and troubleshooting any outages
• Create well-modeled data sets for easier queries and quick analysis
• Automate the cleaning of unclean / semi-structured datasets (on rare occasions, coordinate contractors when manual data cleaning is required)
• Control fine grained data access for internal and external users, especially for sensitive, PII data

Experiment Design and Analysis

• Lead A/B testing strategy, design, activation, analysis of results and recommendations to help answer questions related to subsidy programs Maisha Meds runs, healthcare behavior change, and product and growth optimization
• Use state-of-the-art planning and targeting tools and interfaces to perform A/B and multivariate testing of various levels of complexity.
• Deeply understand Maisha Meds objectives and partner with key stakeholders in operations, strategy, tech, and among external research partners to drive the A/B testing process and produce winning tests and actionable recommendations

Our Technologies:

• dbt
• Terraform
• Rivery
• Snowflake
• Metabase and Redash

Our Ideal Candidate:

• Data Science leadership - You’ve built and led data science teams before and have a track record of building strong teams and supporting the growth and development of your team members.
• Opinionated partnership - You are a strong cross-functional partner, can speak cogently to technical and non-technical leaders, and have a track record of quickly building trust, debating and making progress with your partners.
• Pragmatic and business-oriented: You understand that Product Data Science is not one-size-fits-all, and the mix of opportunistic analysis, experimentation varies depending on the business and product. You’re able to make effective tradeoffs between certainty and
• A credible technical coach for your team who is willing to get your hands dirty - You have expertise in SQL and at least one scripting language (ideally Python or R) and have ideally led teams with a mix of more analytical and statistically oriented data scientists.
• Commitment to diversity: You have built and are committed to building diverse and inclusive teams; you value empathetic and direct communication and foster environments that are at once collaborative, empowering, supportive, and challenging—ones where people do their best work.

Nice to Haves:

• You have worked at a growing start-up.
• You have experience in both B2B and B2C environments.
• You have experience evaluating and launching new analytical tools and systems across a fast-growing organization.
• You have prior experience in healthcare and/or East Africa
• You’re familiar with supply chain forecasting  or credit scoring

Why You Should Join Us

• On a roll: Doubling year over year with new funding partnerships soon to be announced and recent expansion into Uganda, Nigeria, and Tanzania
• Great team: Founded, managed and backed by successful veterans of Stanford School of Medicine, Google, Lions Head Investment Bank, I&M Bank.  We have technologists, clinicians, and economists working side by side to solve difficult problems.
• Great funders: We’re backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID Development Innovation Ventures, CIFF, WHO FIND, and Pfizer to pay for healthcare on behalf of patients, with others to be announced soon.
• Huge market: Disrupting a massive, growing $50+ billion market for healthcare payments for low-income patients, with a focus on paying for health outcomes to ensure patients get better.
• Great customers: Create incentives that ensure our nurses, pharmacists, and clinicians provide excellent care and pay them when this happens.
• Impact: A fun and exciting start-up culture that empowers its people to make a huge impact.