About the Role

We’re looking for senior technical leaders who can architect and scale intelligent systems that architect the "brain" of our dark store operations. As a senior data scientist you won’t just be building models, you’ll be optimizing the lifecycle of millions of items from the moment they leave a supplier to the moment they reach a customer’s doorstep in under 20 minutes. You will tackle the classic "perishable trade-off" ensuring our shelves are always stocked with what customers want, while ruthlessly minimizing wastage and maximizing every square centimetre of our dark store floor space.

What You'll Do

• Demand Forecasting: Build and deploy high-precision forecasting models to predict hyper-local demand at the SKU-store level.
• Inventory & Availability: Develop replenishment algorithms that balance In-Stock Availability with the risk of expiry, specifically for high-turnover perishables.
• Wastage Mitigation: Use ML to identify items at risk of expiring and trigger automated interventions including reduced-to-clear discounting, intra-store replenishment etc.
• Dynamic Pricing & Discounts: Design and A/B test pricing strategies that move inventory efficiently without eroding margins.
• Space Management: Optimize dark store space determining which items should be stored where within the dark store to minimize picker travel time and maximize storage density.
• End-to-End Ownership: Work closely with Product Managers and Supply Chain Operations to turn your models into production-level code that dictates real-world logistics.

What You'll Need

• Academic Background & Experience: 8+ years of experience in Data Science, ideally in E-commerce, Q-commerce, or Supply Chain. A background in Operations Research or Statistics. Hands-on proficiency in Python, Spark and ML frameworks. Experience with real-time inference systems and model monitoring in production. Strong understanding of experimentation, A/B testing, and causal inference. Demonstrated ability to drive architectural decisions across teams.
• Technical Skills: Professional-grade Python and SQL. Experience with optimization libraries (like Gurobi, CPLEX, or PuLP) and ML frameworks (XGBoost, LightGBM, or PyTorch).
• Problem Solving: Experience with Stochastic Optimization or Reinforcement Learning for inventory management is highly preferred.
• Business Intuition: You understand that a 1% reduction in wastage across 100+ stores translates to millions in saved EBITDA.
• Communication Skills: Excellent communication skills and ability to translate complex modelling trade-offs into business impact.

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.

About the Role

As a Staff Data Scientist I – ETA, you will own the end-to-end ETA prediction systems for Careem’s Food and Groceries verticals. This is a highly technical Individual Contributor role with full domain ownership across architecture, modeling strategy, experimentation, production deployment, and operational excellence.

You will define the long-term vision for ETA systems in high-load, latency-sensitive marketplace environments. You will design and implement multi-stage stochastic pipelines that model preparation time, assignment delay, pickup time, travel time, batching, and pooling effects delivering reliable, calibrated predictions at scale. This role requires deep expertise in time-series forecasting, deep learning, and operations research combined with strong production experience in distributed and real-time systems. You will collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Marketplace, and Operations leaders, ensuring ETA becomes a core competitive advantage in Careem’s Everything App.

What You'll Do

1. ETA Vision & Architecture Ownership

• Define and own the long-term technical vision for ETA systems across Food and Groceries.
• Architect scalable, multi-stage pipelines.
• Design probabilistic and stochastic modeling approaches with uncertainty calibration and reliability guarantees.
• Establish modeling standards and best practices for ETA across the organization.

2. Advanced Modeling & Algorithm Development

• Develop and deploy production-grade ML systems leveraging:
• Deep learning architectures
• Time-series forecasting
• Graph-based and routing-aware models
• Operations research techniques
• Build models robust to marketplace volatility and supply-demand shifts.
• Optimize for both point accuracy and distributional correctness (confidence intervals, tail control).
• Continuously improve system performance under high traffic and low-latency constraints.

3. Production Systems & Real-Time Inference

• Design and deploy scalable real-time inference pipelines.
• Ensure model reliability, monitoring, alerting, and graceful degradation under load.
• Collaborate with Data Platform and ML Ops teams to productionize models using Spark, Trino, Python, and distributed frameworks.
• Lead model lifecycle management, retraining strategies, and performance tracking in live environments.

4. Experimentation & Marketplace Impact

• Define clear evaluation frameworks aligned with business metrics (conversion, cancellations, fulfillment efficiency, customer trust).
• Design and run controlled experiments to measure ETA improvements and marketplace impact.
• Drive measurable improvements in operational efficiency and user experience through data-driven insights.

5. Technical Leadership & Cross-Team Influence

• Lead cross-team architectural discussions.
• Conduct design reviews and raise the technical bar for modeling quality and system robustness.
• Mentor senior data scientists and engineers in advanced ML and modeling techniques.
• Contribute to Careem’s applied AI community through technical talks, documentation, and research initiatives.
  
  

What You'll Need

• 8+ years of experience in Applied Machine Learning or Data Science, with significant experience building large-scale production systems.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering, Operations Research, or a related quantitative field.
• Proven expertise in:
• Time-series forecasting
• Deep learning
• Stochastic modeling
• Operations research and optimization
• Strong experience building and deploying high-load, low-latency ML systems.
• Hands-on proficiency in Python, Spark and ML frameworks.
• Experience with real-time inference systems and model monitoring in production.
• Strong understanding of experimentation, A/B testing, and causal inference.
• Demonstrated ability to drive architectural decisions across teams.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to translate complex modeling trade-offs into business impact.
  
  

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.

About the Role

As a Staff Data Scientist I – Matching, you will own the end-to-end matching and dispatch architecture for Careem’s Food and Groceries verticals. You will design and implement real-time assignment systems that optimize cost, SLA compliance, and marketplace efficiency at scale.

This role sits at the core of the marketplace engine solving complex, multi-objective optimization problems under uncertainty. You will build systems that dynamically match orders to captains, optimize batching and pooling decisions, and continuously re-optimize as new information arrives. You will operate as a senior technical IC, leading architecture decisions, mentoring other data scientists, and setting optimization standards across the domain.

What You'll Do

1. Matching & Dispatch Architecture Ownership

• Design and own the end-to-end matching and dispatch systems for Food & Groceries.
• Architect scalable assignment frameworks incorporating:
• Static and dynamic assignment
• Online matching under uncertainty
• Batch and pooling optimization
• Continuous re-optimization with dynamic events
• Establish robust optimization standards and best practices across the organization.

2. Multi-Objective Optimization & Algorithm Development

• Formulate and implement multi-objective optimization models balancing:
• Cost minimization
• SLA compliance
• Marketplace efficiency
• Develop and deploy:
• Min-cost flow and assignment models
• Graph-based optimization frameworks
• Custom solvers and OR-Tools based solutions
• Incorporate stochastic elements and uncertainty-aware decision-making into assignment policies.
• Continuously refine matching quality under high-scale marketplace conditions.

3. Real-Time Systems & Production Delivery

• Build production-grade real-time matching systems using Python, Spark, and Trino.
• Design scalable pipelines capable of handling large-scale, high-throughput marketplace events.
• Collaborate with Engineering and Platform teams to ensure reliable model serving and system performance.
• Lead performance monitoring, diagnostics, and system optimization.

4. Experimentation & Impact Measurement

• Define evaluation metrics aligned with marketplace and operational objectives.
• Design and run controlled experiments to quantify matching improvements.
• Analyze system trade-offs and communicate clear, data-driven recommendations to Product and Operations stakeholders.
• Ensure decisions translate into measurable improvements in efficiency and SLA performance.

What You'll Need

• 6–8+ years of experience in Applied Machine Learning, Optimization, or Data Science.
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Operations Research, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.
• Strong expertise in:
• Optimization and assignment algorithms
• Graph modeling and min-cost flow problems
• Multi-objective optimization
• Dynamic and online decision systems
• Hands-on experience with OR-Tools or custom optimization solvers.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, Spark, and distributed data systems.
• Experience building real-time or near-real-time decision systems.
• Strong understanding of experimentation and performance evaluation in marketplace systems.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain algorithmic trade-offs in business terms.

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.