{"id":1410364,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ziina-head-of-data","title":"Head of Data","company":{"id":48617,"name":"Ziina","domain":"ziina.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/ziina","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":70,"open_postings":14,"ghost_share":0.5,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Dubai, United Arab Emirates"],"countries":["AE"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":61000,"max_usd":137000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":3940},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"A/B Testing","optional":false},{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Core ML","optional":false},{"name":"Feature Store","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false},{"name":"dbt","optional":true},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Kotlin","optional":true},{"name":"Metabase","optional":true},{"name":"Nest.JS","optional":true},{"name":"Next.js","optional":true},{"name":"Node JS","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true},{"name":"Redis","optional":true},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":true},{"name":"Swift","optional":true},{"name":"SwiftUI","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-28T13:02:43Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-28","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T18:39:48Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":22,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":21},"description":"Ziina is looking for a Head of Data to build and lead our new Data team. This role is an exciting opportunity to make AI, predictive analytics, and experimentation part of how every team at Ziina works. That could mean CX forecasting next month's ticket volume to plan staffing, BD reaching the right merchant segments, or Product building intelligent search and features that anticipate what our users want to do next. We're at a major inflection point in our growth. We have rich payments data, a strong platform foundation, and a founding team of data platform and AI engineers already in place. We're looking for the right leader to set the vision and turn it into platforms people actually use.\nAs the founding leader of a small, agile team, our ideal candidate is a hands-on builder with the vision to design platforms from the ground up and the judgment to know which to build first. You'll thrive in our fast-paced environment by making tradeoffs, shipping early use cases that prove value, and turning them into self-serve tools the rest of the company can use. We're looking for someone who is as ambitious as we are to deliver high-quality products to our users. In short, we want owners who are ready to build big things with us.\nAs a Head of Data at Ziina you will:\nDefine 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\n\nEvolve 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\n\nLead, 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\n\nBuild the self-serve ML, LLM, agent and experimentation platforms that let every team at Ziina put AI to work safely and measurably\n\nPartner 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\n\nEstablish AI and model governance in line with regulatory expectations for licensed financial institutions, including model risk management, monitoring, bias testing, explainability, and human oversight\n\nKey skills and characteristics\nHave 8+ years of experience in data, ML, or AI engineering, including 3+ years leading teams that shipped ML or AI systems to production\n\nHave 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\n\nHave shipped LLM-powered products or internal tools to production, with hands-on experience in evals, prompt iteration, retrieval, and model routing or cost optimization\n\nHave hands-on experience with agent frameworks and tool-use protocols such as MCP, and a clear point of view on giving agents access safely\n\nUnderstand experimentation deeply, including experiment design, statistical power, guardrail metrics, and the common ways A/B tests mislead\n\nAre still hands-on: comfortable writing Python and SQL, reviewing designs, and building alongside a small team\n\nCan translate technical work into business outcomes and influence leaders in non-technical teams\n\nAre based in, or open to relocating to, the UAE\n\nWhat would amaze us\nProven experience building data and AI platforms at a fintech, payments company, or other regulated, high-throughput business\n\nA track record of taking a Data function from zero (or near-zero) to a platform used across the company\n\nProduction ML experience in payments, such as fraud, risk, forecasting, personalisation, or merchant intelligence\n\nHands-on experience with model risk management and AI governance under a financial regulator\n\nExperience building AI products for Arabic-speaking users or MENA markets\n\nActive engagement in the tech community through open source contributions, conference speaking, or technical writing\n\nOur tech stack\nWe've built a modular architecture with the principles of reliability, scalability, and maintainability in mind. Our current stack is:\nTypescript, Node.js and Nest.js for our main application’s backend.\n\nNext.js, React and TypeScript for our web applications.\n\nSwift/SwiftUI for our iOS app, Kotlin for our Android app.\n\nPostgreSQL for consistent and durable storage, Redis for quick fetching, Elasticsearch for quick searching.\n\nSnowflake for our data warehouse, dbt for transformations, and Metabase for BI.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4613,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"Arabic","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Payment Processing & Gateways","Money Transfer & Remittances"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-28T19:06:16Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":43,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.579,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":21,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-20T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/ziina-head-of-data","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/ziina-head-of-data.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-20T22:28:35Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":26303,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-21T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":48617},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=48617"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fziina-head-of-data"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fziina-head-of-data"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fziina-head-of-data"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/ziina-head-of-data\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fziina-head-of-data"}]}