Data Science Manager

This role is the primary owner of demand forecasting, demand sensing, demand planning, and advanced customer segmentation capabilities – driving measurable commercial impact across a multi-brand, multi-market retail portfolio spanning UAE, KSA, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain. The role partners closely with brand owners and buying and planning teams.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end demand forecasting across SKU, category, and brand levels (short, medium, long term), incorporating seasonality, promotions, sell-through, and external market factors across GCC markets.
• Lead demand sensing initiatives using real-time POS, digital, and macro signals to anticipate near-term demand shifts and enable rapid commercial decisions.
• Partner with Buying & Planning teams to translate forecasts into OTB, replenishment, markdown optimisation, and NPI strategies, presented in clear commercial language.
• Design advanced customer segmentation models (RFM, CLV, behavioural and propensity models) to enable personalised marketing, CRM, and loyalty activation.
• Identify and prioritise high-impact AI use cases across pricing, assortment, promotions, churn, store clustering, and next-best-action with quantified business value.
• Drive adoption of Computer Vision solutions including footfall analytics, shelf compliance, planogram adherence, visual search, and automated product tagging.
• Lead NLP and conversational AI initiatives such as chatbots, sentiment analysis, multilingual (Arabic/English) text analytics, and automated product content generation.
• Build and scale production-grade ML solutions on Azure/Microsoft Fabric, including automated pipelines, monitoring, drift detection, and executive reporting via Power BI.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).
• Advanced degree in related topics is a strong plus.
• Background or previous experience in retail, fashion, or lifestyle industry is strongly preferred.
• Experience in GCC/MENA markets is an advantage.
• Strong customer segmentation & CLV modeling experience.