Director - Prediction and Data

Ezra; Dubai; On-site; AED 400,000 - 500,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading fintech company in Dubai is seeking an experienced Data Science and Data Engineering leader. The role involves guiding technical teams and driving innovative analytics for financial products. Candidates should possess extensive experience in machine learning, software engineering, and a strong background in fintech. The ideal applicant will demonstrate leadership within technology-driven environments, ensuring the delivery of impactful data solutions while supporting robust risk management.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Growth opportunities

Health benefits

Qualifications

• 12+ years operationalizing machine learning models in production environments.
• 5+ years leadership experience managing multiple technical teams.
• 6+ years writing robust, production-grade Python software.

Responsibilities

• Partner with various teams to implement modelling methodologies.
• Design and maintain scalable machine learning systems.
• Build and mentor a high-performing analytics team.

Skills

Machine learning

Software engineering

Data analysis

Python programming

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics or related field

Tools

SQL (PostgreSQL, Redshift)

MLflow

Docker

FastAPI

Job description

About the role:

Ezra is seeking an experienced data science and data engineering leader for our Dubai fintech team.

This role blends leadership with strong technical expertise across predictive analytics in the micro-credit and lending space. You will lead a combined team of data engineers, machine learning engineers, and prediction analysts through the full data lifecycle from raw data to production and monitoring of predictive models that deliver innovative, scalable prediction solutions that drive financial inclusion across EZRA’s markets.

Working alongside the credit risk, product and commercial teams, you will deliver innovative, scalable prediction solutions that support measurable business and revenue decisions to optimise growth within robust risk management frameworks.

This role requires a strong foundation in software engineering, machine learning, and data platforms, with the ability to think strategically while delivering production-ready systems and solutions. Experience in Fintech, credit scoring and/or mobile money / micro-lending is highly advantageous.

Key responsibilities:

Business Impact

• Partner with Risk, Product, and Commercial teams to turn alternate datasets, modelling methodologies, automation and modelling outputs into practical market rules, portfolio strategies, limit-setting frameworks, and profitability levers.
• Through risk and affordability frameworks, and in close collaboration with Credit Risk, drive improvements in collections performance, reduce credit losses, enhance the customer lifecycle value, increase the product value proposition and support profitable scaling of Airtime Credit, Nano, Overdraft, Line of Credit, Instalment and BNPL, etc. product lines across a multitude of customer segments, i.e. consumer, agent, merchant, SMME..
• Standardise scoring pipelines, feature stores, model governance, and real-time data flows to support rapid expansion into new markets, partners, and product lines with consistent performance.
• Maintain and evolve a “champion/challenger” framework as a means to test and finetune pockets of opportunity at a market/product level, striving further towards revenue and risk optimisation.

Technology development

• Design and maintain scalable machine learning systems, data pipelines, and APIs for credit decisioning.
• Optimize and expand internal codebases for model training, scoring, monitoring, and feature generation.
• Drive production deployments with high-quality, testable, and maintainable code.
• Develop and progress continuous automation and real-time capability in support of the product roadmap and evolution thereof.
• Enhance documentation, reproducibility, observability, and overall system reliability.

Team & Strategic Leadership

• Build and mentor a high-performing team across prediction analytics, machine learning engineering, and data engineering.
• Lead the prediction and data roadmap aligned with Ezra’s business expansion goals.
• Present risk insights, model performance, and strategic recommendations to executive leadership and key stakeholders.

Qualifications and Experience:

• 12+ years operationalizing machine learning models in production environments.
• 5+ years leadership experience managing multiple technical teams.
• 6+ years writing robust, production-grade Python software (OOP, modular design).
• 6+ years designing and implementing feature stores and feature engineering workflows in SQL (PostgreSQL, Redshift, or similar) and/or Python.
• 5+ years serving ML models via RESTful APIs (e.g., FastAPI) or high-scale batch processes.
• 3+ years ML Ops experience with tools such as MLflow and Docker.
• Strong understanding of model monitoring, data quality systems, and governance.
• Strong Git experience in collaborative development environments.
• Comfortable working in Linux environments and CLI-based tooling.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Bitbucket Pipelines).
• Excellent analytical, written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical teams and presenting analytical outcomes in a methodical and articulate manner.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.

The ideal candidate is someone who is:

• Passionate about producing impactful, customer-centric machine learning products.
• Motivated by continuous improvement and high-quality execution.
• Open to constructive feedback and reflective about personal and professional growth.
• Detail-oriented, organised, and values process, automation, and documentation.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, high-growth fintech environment.

About us:

Ezra provides B2B digital lending solutions for emerging markets in partnership with mobile and digital wallet operators and financial service providers. Ezra supports 24 operations in 23 countries, across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Our key office locations are in Nairobi, Kenya and Dubai, UAE.

Our flagship products are Airtime Credit Services (ACS), Nano and BNPL.

• ACS is an airtime or data advance offered to prepaid mobile subscribers at the point of low credit.
• Nano is a micro cash advance offered to mobile wallet users on demand.
• BNPL facilitates payment installments for products and services

As a FinTech company, our business is entirely technology and data driven, from determining subscriber eligibility, generating relevant offers, managing risk, loan issuance, recovery, optimizing performance and reporting, reconciliation and billing.

Each day we process approximately 21M loan requests and 1.4 TB of data across our markets. This process needs to be robust, reliable and secure.

But it doesn’t end there. We’re exploring new ways of using our platform and transactional data to improve our products and develop new product opportunities.