First ML Engineer: Build Ground‑Up AI Platform

Tanqeeb; Dubai; On-site; AED 340,000 - 480,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity options

Flexible working environment

Job summary

Global Drum is seeking a visionary Machine Learning Engineer to become our first ML hire, embedding data science and applied ML into our AI-native, multi-tenant platform. You will work directly with the Director of Engineering and product owners to turn audience, content, and revenue data into models that power recommendations, audience understanding, and monetisation decisions across the platform.

This is a rare opportunity to define the ML function from the ground up: choosing the stack,

Qualifications

• Proven hands-on experience building and deploying recommender systems in production.

Responsibilities

• Own Recommendations End-to-End: Design, build, and iterate on recommender systems that surface content and audience opportunities to our media partners.
• Build the ML Foundation: Establish the first ML pipelines, feature stores, experimentation frameworks, and model-serving infrastructure for the platform.
• Data-to-Product Pipeline: Partner with the engineering team to design real-time, event-driven data pipelines that feed model training and low-latency inference.
• Experimentation & Evaluation: Define offline and online evaluation methodology (A/B testing, holdout sets, ranking metrics) to validate model impact on engagement and revenue.
• Set ML Standards: Establish best practices for model development, versioning, reproducibility, monitoring, and responsible use of data.
• Stay Hands-On: Write production-grade ML code, heavily leveraging modern AI coding assistants and agentic development workflows to move fast as a team of one (initially).
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Work closely with the Engineering and platform/revenue product owners to translate business and product questions into ML-solvable problems.
• Scale the Function: As the first ML hire, help define the roadmap and hiring plan for the ML team as it grows.

Skills

Recommender systems

Graph Neural Networks

Network science

Large-scale data

ML lifecycle

PyTorch

TensorFlow

MLOps

Startup experience

AI coding assistants

Agentic workflows

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

MLOps

Job description

Global Drum is seeking a visionary Machine Learning Engineer to become our first ML hire, embedding data science and applied ML into our AI-native, multi-tenant platform. You will work directly with the Director of Engineering and product owners to turn audience, content, and revenue data into models that power recommendations, audience understanding, and monetisation decisions across the platform.

This is a rare opportunity to define the ML function from the ground up: choosing the stack,