Lead Data Scientist

• Build the data science function from one person to a team, including its charter, hiring, and modelling standards
• Own fraud detection as a product, including transaction and payment risk scoring, chargeback and refund abuse, account takeover, promo abuse, and agent and merchant anomaly detection
• Set fraud thresholds with fraud and operations teams and defend the loss-versus-friction tradeoff
• Own identity management modelling, including identity resolution, record linkage, deduplication, match confidence, profile completeness scoring, and unified customer profiles
• Drive next-best-action and segmentation for personalised customer communication
• Deploy and maintain models in production with cloud and MLOps teams, including monitoring, drift detection, retraining, rollback, and measurable business outcomes
• Own demand and stock forecasting, predictive budget, category and SKU-level targets, churn, and lifetime value models
• Own experiment design across product and marketing, including hypotheses, minimum detectable effects, decision rules, and readouts
• Define boundaries with data engineering and analytics
• Provide stakeholders with decisions supported by validated metrics rather than notebooks

• 7+ years in data science
• 2+ years leading or mentoring scientists
• Experience as the first or second scientist is valued
• Models in production with live traffic, monitoring, and quantified effects
• Fraud or risk modelling depth
• Experience in at least one of: identity resolution and entity matching, forecasting, churn and lifetime value, personalisation, uplift modelling, causal inference
• Strong SQL against large transaction and event data in a columnar warehouse
• Strong Python
• Ability to write maintainable, executable code
• Experimental and causal rigour, including quasi-experimental methods where randomisation is not possible
• Consumer fintech or payments fluency, including transactions, funnels, cohorts, and fraud patterns
• Ability to align product, engineering, marketing, and commercial stakeholders on one problem definition
• AI-assisted working, with the ability to explain all shipped output

• Immediate, large-scale impact on a high-growth business
• Top-of-the-market compensation packages
• Work alongside top regional talent, with team members from Talabat, Careem, Etisalat, and more