About the Role
You will build and lead the team that turns data into actionable insights for the business. Operating across various verticals such as digital goods, ticketing, travel, and trading in Iraq, the UAE, and KSA, you will address the challenges posed by fragmented reporting systems that currently delay decision-making. By hiring and managing your team and owning the data platform from ingestion through to analytics, you will create a reliable data capability that the organization can trust.
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What You'll Do
- Build and lead the data team: hire, mentor, and grow data and analytics engineers, establishing a key function that every other team relies on daily.
- Own the technical strategy and architecture for the data platform, including ingestion from operational systems, warehouse and modeling layer, orchestration, and a consistent semantic layer for metrics across verticals.
- Establish a single source of truth for core business metrics, ensuring definitions are agreed upon by commercial, finance, and product teams, and create reproducible, trusted data pipelines.
- Deliver self-serve analytics, enabling most questions to be answered without a ticket, allowing the team to focus on platform enhancements rather than ad hoc queries.
- Treat data as a product and ensure its reliability by implementing freshness SLAs, lineage tracking, testing, and alerting systems for upstream issues.
- Collaborate with security and legal teams on governance, access control, data retention, and handling PII across varying regulatory environments.
- Build the foundation for future data capabilities, including event tracking standards and data necessary for data science, personalization, fraud, and risk management.
- Partner with product and engineering teams to integrate instrumentation and data contracts directly into services.
What You'll Bring
- 8+ years in software or data engineering, including 3+ years leading engineering teams and experience hiring and developing engineers.
- Direct experience in building and operating a production data platform, managing batch and streaming ingestion, warehouse modeling, orchestration, and ensuring operational reliability at scale.
- Strong hands-on technical judgment to manage design reviews and make informed decisions on build vs. buy, especially regarding warehouse and tooling expenditures.
- Proficiency in SQL and dimensional modeling, along with familiarity in a Python, TypeScript, Go, Postgres, and AWS environment.
- Demonstrated track record in aligning organizations on metric definitions and creating consensus around data interpretation.
- Strong governance instincts, treating access, PII, and retention as integral design considerations rather than mere compliance issues.
- Sound judgment in sequencing platform builds to provide early value, avoiding unnecessary rework in the future.
Nice to Have
- Experience establishing a data function from scratch or merging disparate reporting processes across business divisions.
- Background in analytics related to e-commerce, marketplaces, payments, or fintech products.
- Experience in supporting data science and machine learning in production settings, including feature pipelines, model serving, or MLOps.
- Familiarity with MENA or emerging markets, including multi-currency and multi-market reporting.
Benefits
- Immediate, large-scale impact on a high-growth business.
- Top-of-the-market compensation packages.
- Work alongside top regional talent, with team members from notable companies such as Talabat, Careem, Etisalat, and more.
