Machine Learning Engineer

Join Kavak UAE’s team to build and maintain the machine learning infrastructure that powers our pricing engine. You will develop automated systems for mapping market listings to catalog SKUs, refine pricing algorithms, and create ML models that enhance pricing accuracy, strategy, and margins. Your work will transform manual, person-dependent processes into reliable, measurable systems that are regularly retrained and improved.

Key Responsibilities:
- Develop and maintain the listing-to-SKU mapping engine using rules, text matching, classifiers, confidence thresholds, and human review queues.
- Create an image-based car identification model to classify make, model, year, generation, and trim for listings lacking usable text.
- Manage and optimize the local pricing algorithm by monitoring performance, running experiments, improving accuracy, reducing bias, and reporting outcomes.
- Design backtests, holdout sets, and audit samples to measure model accuracy and report findings by segment.
- Productionize models as scheduled pipelines with monitoring, retraining, and data quality checks.
- Build and maintain data pipelines integrating data from warehouses, scrapers, catalogs, and back-office systems.
- Develop supporting models for pricing strategy, including depreciation curves, price elasticity, days-to-sell, and demand forecasting.
- Convert reviewer feedback and manual overrides into training data and rules with defined expiry dates.
- Document models, assumptions, and results clearly for non-technical stakeholders.
- Collaborate with Pricing, Data, Product, and global teams to manage data access, deployment, and prioritize initiatives.

Required Qualifications:
- 3 to 5 years of experience in machine learning engineering or applied data science, with at least two models deployed to production.
- Background in e-commerce, marketplaces, automotive, fintech, or pricing/valuation domains.
- Proficiency with tabular models (pricing, regression, classification) and experience working with text and image data.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field.
- Master’s degree in Machine Learning or Data Science is preferred.

Technical Skills:
- Strong Python ML stack skills including pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM, and PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- Expertise in SQL and working with cloud data warehouses such as BigQuery or Databricks.
- Experience with pricing models including regression, quantile regression, and prediction intervals.
- Knowledge of text matching and entity resolution techniques such as normalization, fuzzy matching, tokenization, and embeddings for listing-to-SKU matching.
- Solid understanding of statistics and evaluation methods including holdout/backtest design, calibration, confidence intervals, and A/B testing.
- Familiarity with MLOps tools like Docker, Airflow (or similar), experiment tracking (MLflow or Weights & Biases), monitoring, and retraining workflows.
- Data quality automation experience using tools like Great Expectations.
- Strong engineering practices including GitLab CI/CD, code reviews, and testing.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS.
- Computer vision skills in fine-grained image classification, transfer learning, image embeddings, and vision-language models.
- Working knowledge of large language models (LLMs) and vector search technologies like FAISS or vector databases for structured data extraction.
- Pricing analytics expertise including price elasticity and survival analysis for days-to-sell.
- Experience with human-in-the-loop systems, labeling tools (Label Studio, CVAT), and active learning to reduce manual review.
- Model serving using REST APIs with FastAPI.
- Web scraping skills with Scrapy or Playwright, including handling site layout changes and compliance with site terms of use.
- Reporting and dashboard creation using Looker Studio, Streamlit, or Databricks.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits:
- Certifications such as Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer or AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate are a plus.
- DeepLearning.AI specializations are preferred.
- Proficiency in Arabic language is an advantage.

If you are passionate about leveraging machine learning to revolutionize pricing strategies in a dynamic environment, Kavak UAE offers an exciting opportunity to be part of this innovative journey. Apply now to contribute your expertise and grow with us.