Lead Data Scientist

**Lead Data Scientist \- Financial Services, Abu Dhabi** **Discover the Opportunity** We’re partnering with a leading financial services organisation in Abu Dhabi that is continuing to scale its advanced analytics and AI capabilities. This role sits within a high\-impact AI and product analytics team, focused on delivering production\-grade machine learning solutions that drive data\-led decision\-making across the business. You will play a key role in translating complex business challenges into scalable data science solutions, working closely with product, engineering, and architecture teams to deliver real\-world impact. This is a highly hands\-on position suited to a technically strong data scientist who enjoys owning the full lifecycle of AI use cases while contributing to best practices across modelling, experimentation, and MLOps. **Discover the Responsibilities** * Translate complex business problems into structured analytical and machine learning solutions, defining hypotheses, success metrics, and validation strategies * Lead the design and development of advanced statistical, machine learning, and NLP models to solve high\-impact use cases * Own the end\-to\-end data science lifecycle, including data exploration, feature engineering, model development, validation, and deployment * Conduct rigorous experimentation using cross\-validation, back\-testing, and statistical analysis to continuously improve model performance * Collaborate with data engineering teams to ensure high\-quality, scalable data pipelines and curated datasets for production use * Support model deployment using APIs, batch, or streaming approaches, ensuring scalability, performance, and security * Monitor model performance, data drift, and reliability, implementing retraining strategies and lifecycle management processes * Ensure models meet interpretability, fairness, and regulatory standards within a governed environment * Contribute to code quality, reusability, documentation standards, and continuous improvement of team practices * Support model governance, documentation, and audit readiness, ensuring compliance with internal and regulatory frameworks **Discover the Requirements** * 8\+ years of experience delivering end\-to\-end data science and machine learning solutions in production environments * Strong hands\-on expertise in Python (e.g. pandas, NumPy) and SQL, with experience writing clean, production\-ready code * Strong foundation in statistics, experimentation, and analytical techniques, including hypothesis testing and A/B testing * Experience with supervised and unsupervised machine learning, feature engineering, model selection, and performance optimisation * Experience working with large datasets, including data preparation, EDA, and insight generation * Experience deploying and maintaining models in production, including monitoring, retraining, and lifecycle management * Strong understanding of MLOps practices and working within CI/CD\-driven environments * Experience working in regulated or data\-governed environments is highly preferred * Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to communicate complex insights to both technical and non\-technical audiences * Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field