[Hiring] Senior Data Scientist II - Personalization @Careem

Role Description

Careem is building the Everything App for the greater Middle East — making it easy to move around, order food and groceries, manage payments, and more. Our purpose is simple: to simplify and improve people’s lives and build an awesome organisation that inspires.

We’re now entering our next chapter — one powered by AI. We’re looking for AI talent: curious problem-solvers who know how to apply AI to build tools, automate workflows, and create real impact.

About The Team:

• The Personalization team sits within Careem's Data Science organization and owns the AI systems that decide what every user sees, in what order, and why across Food, Quik, and Shops.
• Our mission is to build the hyper-personalization layer for the Careem app: real-time, cross-vertical recommendation and ranking systems.
• As one of the senior technical leads on this team, you'll help define how Careem thinks about personalization at a regional scale.

What You'll Do:

• Drive real-time, cross-vertical personalization.
• Advance graph-based retrieval.
• Build next-generation ranking models.
• Pioneer real-time learning.
• Build for cross-learning.
• Be part of a 0-to-1 AI transformation for the Careem app.
• Drive exploratory analysis to understand user behavior across verticals.
• Shape and influence the ML models and instrumentation that optimize the product experience.
• Provide product leadership through data-driven recommendations.
• Implement scalable machine learning algorithms.
• Run exploratory data analysis to better understand user and business phenomena.
• Answer complex analytical questions from large datasets.
• Define and track key metrics for specific personalization initiatives.
• Design and run randomized controlled experiments (A/B tests).
• Continually challenge the status quo investigating new data processing technologies.
• Build and deploy retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.

Qualifications

• 6-8 years of experience in data mining, predictive modeling, time series analysis, machine learning, and Big Data methodologies.
• Advanced degree in a quantitative discipline such as Physics, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or Computer Science.
• Solid experience with deep learning techniques including attention mechanisms, retrieval models, and transformer-based architectures.
• 2-4 years of industry experience in personalization, recommendation, or search.
• Strong problem-solving and coding skills.
• Solid knowledge of A/B testing methodology, classical ML, and deep learning.
• Solid understanding of recommendations, ranking, and retrieval systems end-to-end.
• Proficiency and demonstrated experience in Python, SQL, Spark, and Hive.
• Demonstrated experience with database technologies.
• Demonstrated experience with business intelligence and visualization tools.

Benefits

• Opportunity to drive impact in the region while learning and growing.
• Work and learn from great minds by joining a community of inspiring colleagues.
• Put your passion to work in a purposeful organization.
• Explore new opportunities to learn and grow every day.
• Work remotely from any country in the world for 30 days a year with unlimited vacation days.
• Access to healthcare benefits and fitness reimbursements for health activities.