Head of Data

About the Role
We are seeking a Head of Data to build and lead our new Data team. This role presents an exciting opportunity to integrate AI, predictive analytics, and experimentation into the workflows of every team. Potential initiatives could involve customer experience (CX) forecasting ticket volumes for staffing, business development (BD) targeting appropriate merchant segments, or product teams creating intelligent features that guide user actions. We are at a significant juncture in our growth, equipped with rich payment data, a robust platform foundation, and a dedicated team of data platform and AI engineers. We need a visionary leader to define our data strategy and develop platforms that are widely adopted across the organization.

As the founding leader of a small, agile team, the ideal candidate will be a hands-on builder with the foresight to design platforms from the ground up and the discernment to prioritize key initiatives. Success in this fast-paced environment will require making strategic trade-offs, delivering valuable early use cases, and evolving them into self-serve tools for the company. We welcome ambitious individuals ready to create exceptional products for our users.

Responsibilities
As a Head of Data, you will:

• Define and own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for data, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) at the organization, focusing on investments that yield the highest value across product and operations.
• Develop existing data foundations, ensuring a reliable, well-modeled warehouse and semantic layer, enabling both internal and AI agents to easily access and utilize data.
• Lead, mentor, and grow the Data team, starting with current data platform engineers and AI engineers, and recruit additional engineers and scientists as we scale.
• Construct self-serve ML, large language model (LLM), agent, and experimentation platforms that empower every team to effectively utilize AI in a safe and measurable manner.
• Collaborate with all functions, including Product, Fincrime, CX, and Finance, to identify high-impact use cases, quickly ship prototypes, and develop repeatable self-serve tools based on successful outcomes.
• Implement AI and model governance in line with regulatory standards for licensed financial institutions, focusing on model risk management, monitoring, bias testing, explainability, and ensuring human oversight.

Key Skills and Characteristics
The ideal candidate will:

• Have 8+ years of experience in data, ML, or AI engineering, including a minimum of 3 years in a leadership role overseeing teams that have successfully deployed ML or AI systems to production.
• Have experience in building or managing core ML platform infrastructure, such as feature stores, training pipelines, model registries, real-time serving, and monitoring, understanding the trade-offs between building and buying solutions at startup scale.
• Demonstrate a track record of deploying LLM-powered products or internal tools with hands-on experience in evaluation, prompt iteration, retrieval, and managing costs.
• Possess hands-on experience with agent frameworks and tool-use protocols, maintaining a clear strategy for safe agent access.
• Have extensive knowledge of experimentation methods, including design, statistical power, guardrail metrics, and common pitfalls in A/B testing.
• Remain hands-on, comfortable writing Python and SQL, reviewing designs, and collaborating with a small team on development.
• Be capable of translating technical initiatives into business outcomes and influencing non-technical leadership.
• Be based in or willing to relocate to the UAE.

What Would Amaze Us
Exceptional candidates will have:

• Proven experience in building data and AI platforms within a fintech, payments, or regulated high-throughput environment.
• A demonstrated ability to create a Data function from inception or close to it, leading to a company-wide platform adoption.
• Experience in production ML applications within payments, such as fraud detection, risk analysis, forecasting, personalization, or merchant intelligence.
• Hands-on experience with model risk management and AI governance compliant with regulations.
• Experience in developing AI products tailored for Arabic-speaking users or for the MENA market.
• Active participation in the tech community through open-source contributions, industry speaking engagements, or technical writing.

Our Tech Stack
We adopt a modular architecture focused on reliability, scalability, and maintainability. Our current technology stack includes:

• Typescript, Node.js, and Nest.js for our main application’s backend.
• Next.js, React, and TypeScript for our web applications.
• Swift/SwiftUI for our iOS app and Kotlin for our Android app.
• PostgreSQL for stable storage, Redis for rapid access, and Elasticsearch for efficient searching.
• Snowflake for our data warehouse, dbt for data transformations, and Metabase for business intelligence.