Senior Data Scientist

Contract duration: 6 months (with a potential extension)
Engagement Type: Full-time
Start date: July 2026
Location: Abu Dhabi (on-site)

Contango is the strategic partner for transformative growth and sustained success for the ADQ portfolio. Our team excels in providing comprehensive growth solutions that combine global best practices with local market expertise. We focus on long‑term value creation, empowering our clients to achieve the full scale of their aspirations. As a trusted advisor to ADQ's portfolio companies, Contango helps CEOs drive strategic growth initiatives, navigate disruptive forces, and maximize long‑term value creation.

As a Senior Data Scientist, you will independently work on specific data projects and be responsible for implementing analytical solutions. You will design, build, deploy, and support end‑to‑end Data & AI solutions. You will translate complex business challenges into scalable, production‑ready analytics and machine learning systems, collaborating closely with product, data engineering, and architecture stakeholders to deliver measurable impact.

• Translate client business problems into end‑to‑end system architectures that combine Data, ML, and software components.
• Lead the design of scalable, modular AI solutions, defining services, interfaces, and data flows.
• Make explicit trade‑offs across performance, cost, latency, and maintainability.
• Define success metrics, SLAs, and non‑functional requirements (reliability, security, scalability).

• Design and implement robust data pipelines (batch and streaming) with strong guarantees on quality, lineage, and observability.
• Build and manage feature pipelines and feature stores, ensuring consistency between training and inference.
• Collaborate with platform teams to define data models, schemas, and storage strategies.
• Enforce standards for data validation, testing, and monitoring within production systems.

• Develop ML solutions using production‑quality code (Python/JS), following software engineering best practices.
• Structure codebases into maintainable, testable modules, with clear separation of concerns.
• Implement unit, integration, and end‑to‑end tests for data and ML components.
• Package models and logic into deployable services (APIs, microservices, batch jobs) using modern frameworks.
• Balance model sophistication with system performance, latency, and operational constraints.

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for ML systems, including automated testing, validation, and deployment.
• Containerize and deploy services using Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud‑native tooling.
• Implement model versioning, experiment tracking, and artifact management.
• Design monitoring and observability systems (logs, metrics, alerts) for both data and model performance.
• Automate retraining, rollback, and release strategies to ensure system resilience.

• Design systems for high availability, fault tolerance, and horizontal scalability.
• Optimize performance across data pipelines and inference services (latency, throughput, cost).
• Apply secure coding practices, access controls, and data protection standards.
• Manage technical debt and ensure long‑term maintainability of production systems.

• Produce developer‑focused documentation (APIs, architecture diagrams, runbooks).
• Establish and enforce coding standards, review processes, and engineering best practices.
• Build reusable libraries, SDKs, and internal frameworks to accelerate delivery.
• Drive continuous improvement in engineering maturity, tooling, and delivery practices across the consultancy.

• Prior experience at management consulting firms and/or Big Tech is an advantage.
• Client‑serving experience is an advantage.
• 5+ years of experience in data science or a related analytical field.
• 5+ years delivering end‑to‑end analytics/ML solutions from problem framing through deployment and ongoing monitoring in production.
• Exper…