Manager Data Scientist - AI

Since launching in Kuwait in 2004, talabat, the leading on-demand food and Q-commerce app for everyday deliveries, has been offering convenience and reliability to its customers. talabat’s local roots run deep, offering a real understanding of the needs of the communities we serve in eight countries across the region.

We harness innovative technology and knowledge to simplify everyday life for our customers, optimize operations for our restaurants and local shops, and provide our riders with reliable earning opportunities daily.

Here at talabat, we are building a high performance culture through engaged workforce and growing talent density. We're all about keeping it real and making a difference. Our 6,000+ strong talabaty are on an awesome mission to spread positive vibes. We are proud to be a multi great place to work award winner.

The Applied AI Tribe is talabat's internal AI engine, a team obsessed with turning cutting‑off AI into genuine, measurable business value. We don't build AI for its own sake. Our north star is Net AI Value Delivered.

• - Product & Tech Platform - AI capabilities embedded into talabat's core product and engineering platform.
• - Business Automations - streamlined workflows that save real time and money across operations.
• - Self‑Serve AI Tools - empowering talabatis to build and use AI without needing to raise a ticket.
• - Training & Onboarding - upskilling the tribe so every team can participate in the AI era.

Our engineering approach is built around shipping agentic AI systems at scale, with a harness-first philosophy, evaluation embedded into every product iteration, and production feedback loops that drive the roadmap.

As Manager, Data Scientist - AI within the Applied AI Tribe, you will lead a team of data scientists building and shipping the ML and generative AI systems that power decisions across talabat's product and business. You are equally a people leader and a technical practitioner, close enough to the work to make great technical decisions and grow your team, while owning the roadmap and delivery.

Your team's work spans the full AI lifecycle: from framing ambiguous business problems through data modelling, feature engineering, model training, deployment, and production monitoring. A significant focus will be leveraging LLMs, agentic systems, and generative AI to automate decisions, enrich data, and build intelligent experiences at scale, all measured against Net AI Value Delivered.

• - Lead, grow, and retain a team of data scientists, setting a high bar for technical quality, fostering a culture of ownership, and supporting each person's career development.
• - Partner with recruiting to attract top data science and ML talent as the tribe scales.
• - Mentor team members in ML best practices, agentic system design, production engineering, and stakeholder communication.
• - Run effective team rituals, planning, design reviews, retrospectives, that keep the team aligned and moving with pace.

• - Translate ambiguous business problems into well‑scoped ML and AI solutions with clear, measurable success criteria tied to the tribe's north star.
• - Own the team's technical roadmap: prioritise high‑impact work across data enrichment, business automation, self‑serve tooling, and agentic product features.
• - Champion harness‑first thinking, ensure evaluation pipelines, LLM observability, tooling, and infrastructure are in place before agent logic is built on top.
• - Embed evaluation into every product iteration: golden datasets, stakeholder‑aligned metrics, and weekly eval…