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.
Since 2012, Careem has enabled earnings for over 2.5 million Captains, simplified the lives of more than 70 million customers, and built a platform where the region’s best talent and entrepreneurs thrive. We operate in 70+ cities across 10 countries, from Morocco to Pakistan.
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. Whether it’s streamlining operations, enhancing customer experience, or reimagining internal systems — we want people who can make Careem work smarter and move faster.
About the Role
As a Data Science Manager (Marketplace & ML), you will lead a team of talented data scientists and ML engineers driving AI innovation across Careem’s Marketplace domain for the mobility of things (Food, Groceries, Q-commerce) - optimizing pricing, ETAs, Matching, Dispatching, Demand Shaping and Supply Rebalancing. You will bridge strategic leadership with hands-on technical execution defining the roadmap for marketplace intelligence, mentoring top regional DS talent, and delivering measurable impact through machine learning systems deployed at scale.
This is a high-stakes high-visibility role that partners closely with Product, Engineering, and Operations to ensure data science becomes a core competitive advantage in Careem’s Everything App.
What You'll Do:
1. Strategic & Technical Leadership
- Define and own the machine learning and algorithms roadmap for Marketplace optimization including supply-demand balance, dispatching, matching, and ETAs.
- Partner with product and engineering leads to identify, prioritize, and deliver high-impact ML and algorithms initiatives with measurable ROI.
- Champion best practices for experimentation, causal inference, and data-driven decision making across Marketplace.
- Collaborate with other DS teams (Search, Personalization, Integrity, Ads, GenAI) to build shared capabilities and ensure platform alignment.
2. Team Management & Development
- Lead and mentor a team of 10+ data scientists, ML engineers, and ML Ops; foster a culture of excellence, innovation, and ownership.
- Provide technical guidance on advanced ML, causal inference, operations research, reinforcement learning, and offline policy evaluation.
- Support career growth through structured feedback, skill development, and exposure to cross-functional projects.
3. Product Impact & Delivery
- Drive the development, deployment, and continuous improvement of ML models powering marketplace efficiency (e.g., ETA prediction, captains JIT matching, dispatching, batching & pooling).
- Ensure robust experimentation pipelines, clear success metrics, and transparent model performance tracking.
- Translate complex analytical insights into clear, actionable recommendations for Product and Operations stakeholders.
- Collaborate with the Data Platform and ML Ops teams to ensure scalable, reliable, and automated model delivery.
4. Innovation & Thought Leadership
- Stay at the forefront of applied AI by piloting emerging techniques (e.g., reinforcement learning, optimization algorithms) in production environments.
- Contribute to Careem’s AI community through internal tech talks, publications, or partnerships with academia and research labs.
- Champion Careem’s mission to lead the region’s AI ecosystem by building applied research and open collaboration opportunities.
What You'll Need:
- 8+ years of experience in Data Science or Applied Machine Learning, including 2+ years in a leadership or team lead capacity.
- Advanced degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering, Operations Research or a related quantitative discipline.
- Proven track record of building and scaling ML systems in production, preferably in marketplace, logistics, pricing.
- Strong problem-solving skills and deep technical knowledge of statistics, optimization, and ML.
- Expertise in Python, SQL, and distributed data frameworks (e.g., Spark, Hive, BigQuery).
- Familiarity with modern ML Ops and experimentation workflows.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts into business impact.
- Passion for mentoring, team-building, and creating human-centered AI products.
What we’ll provide you
We offer colleagues the opportunity to drive impact in the region while they learn and grow. As a full time Careem colleague, you will be able to:
- Work and learn from great minds by joining a community of inspiring colleagues.
- Put your passion to work in a purposeful organisation dedicated to creating impact in a region with a lot of untapped potential.
- Explore new opportunities to learn and grow every day.
- Work 4 days a week in office & 1 day from home, and remotely from any country in the world for 30 days a year with unlimited vacation days per year. (If you are in an individual contributor role in tech, you will have 2 office days a week and 3 to work from home.)
- Access to healthcare benefits and fitness reimbursements for health activities including gym, health club, and training classes.
