Head of Data
Key Skills for This Role
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As a Head of Data at Ziina you will:
Define and own the vision, strategy, and roadmap for data, ML, and AI at Ziina, focusing investment where it creates the most value across product and operations
Evolve the existing data foundations: a trusted, well-modeled warehouse and semantic layer with clear ownership, quality checks and lineage, so data is easy for both people and AI agents to find, understand and use
Lead, grow, and mentor the Data team, starting with our data platform engineers and AI engineer, and hire the next wave of engineers and scientists as we scale
Build the self-serve ML, LLM, agent and experimentation platforms that let every team at Ziina put AI to work safely and measurably
Partner with every function including Product, Fincrime, CX and Finance to find high-impact use cases, ship the first versions alongside them, and turn what works into repeatable, self-serve tools
Establish AI and model governance in line with regulatory expectations for licensed financial institutions, including model risk management, monitoring, bias testing, explainability, and human oversight
Key skills and characteristics
- Have 8+ years of experience in data, ML, or AI engineering, including 3+ years leading teams that shipped ML or AI systems to production
- Have built or run core ML platform infrastructure (feature stores, training pipelines, model registries, real-time serving, and monitoring) and understand the build-vs-buy tradeoffs at startup scale
- Have shipped LLM-powered products or internal tools to production, with hands-on experience in evals, prompt iteration, retrieval, and model routing or cost optimization
- Have hands-on experience with agent frameworks and tool-use protocols such as MCP, and a clear point of view on giving agents access safely
- Understand experimentation deeply, including experiment design, statistical power, guardrail metrics, and the common ways A/B tests mislead
- Are still hands-on: comfortable writing Python and SQL, reviewing designs, and building alongside a small team
- Can translate technical work into business outcomes and influence leaders in non-technical teams
- Are based in, or open to relocating to, the UAE
What would amaze us
Proven experience building data and AI platforms at a fintech, payments company, or other regulated, high-throughput business
A track record of taking a Data function from zero (or near-zero) to a platform used across the company
Production ML experience in payments, such as fraud, risk, forecasting, personalisation, or merchant intelligence
Hands-on experience with model risk management and AI governance under a financial regulator
Experience building AI products for Arabic-speaking users or MENA markets
Active engagement in the tech community through open source contributions, conference speaking, or technical writing
Our tech stack
We've built a modular architecture with the principles of reliability, scalability, and maintainability in mind. Our current stack is:
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, Kotlin for our Android app.
PostgreSQL for consistent and durable storage, Redis for quick fetching, Elasticsearch for quick searching.
Snowflake for our data warehouse, dbt for transformations, and Metabase for BI.
About Ziina
UAE fintech company providing digital-wallet, peer-to-peer transfers, and business payment tools to individuals and businesses.
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