Manager Data and AI

National Foods Limited is embarking on an exciting phase of growth, focusing on strengthening its brands, financial foundation, and global footprint. Committed to sustainability and global recognition, the company is seeking a leader to head its Data & AI function within the Digital, Data & Technology (DDT) division. This role is pivotal in driving measurable value through trusted data, advanced analytics, and AI technologies, including Generative AI, to support strategic decision-making and operational excellence. The successful candidate will oversee the development and governance of analytics and AI platforms, semantic models, and data products, ensuring alignment with business goals, security standards, and the federated organizational structure.

Key Responsibilities

- Collaborate with the Head of ERP & Application to define and implement the enterprise Data & AI strategy, ensuring it supports overall business priorities.
- Own and manage the Data & AI roadmap, including use-case prioritization, platform governance, value tracking, and delivery timelines across a federated model.
- Partner with business leaders to identify and deliver high-impact analytics, AI/ML, and GenAI use-cases, translating these into scalable data and AI products.
- Lead the design of analytics and AI solutions, covering data pipelines, semantic layers, model deployment, and integration with business workflows.
- Oversee the development and maintenance of semantic layers and curated datasets, ensuring data is validated, structured, and aligned with key performance indicators.
- Coordinate with data engineering teams to guarantee timely data ingestion, quality assurance, observability, and pipeline reliability.
- Develop and govern business intelligence products such as dashboards, reports, and self-service datasets across departments including Sales, Finance, Supply Chain, Marketing, Export, HR, and Manufacturing, promoting consistent user experience standards.
- Build, deploy, and operationalize machine learning models (e.g., forecasting, segmentation, optimization, risk assessment) while establishing robust MLOps practices including CI/CD pipelines, model registry, monitoring, and quality controls.
- Lead AI experimentation and delivery initiatives such as copilots, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), summarization, and knowledge assistants, with a strong emphasis on security, privacy, and evaluation metrics like quality and bias.
- Define and enforce Responsible AI frameworks and governance controls in collaboration with Cybersecurity, Legal, and Compliance teams, ensuring model risk management, approvals, documentation, explainability, and auditability.
- Ensure compliance with data governance policies, quality standards, naming conventions, metadata management, lineage tracking, and KPI frameworks.
- Establish standardized processes for project intake, discovery, proof-of-concept to production transitions, product documentation, and post-deployment value measurement.
- Provide hands-on coaching and guidance on tools and methodologies including Power BI, SQL, Python, DAX, machine learning frameworks, and prompt engineering fundamentals to enhance team capabilities and delivery quality.
- Drive adoption through training materials, workshops, enablement sessions, and ongoing support for analytics and AI queries.
- Manage relationships with vendors and implementation partners for analytics and AI tools, cloud services, and platform upgrades, including license and subscription administration.
- Ensure strict adherence to cybersecurity, privacy, and audit requirements related to data access, reporting layers, models, and AI applications.
- Monitor product adoption and business impact by tracking usage, value realization, and service level agreements, preparing performance reports for senior leadership.

Required Qualifications

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field; Master’s degree preferred.
- Minimum of 5 years’ experience in data, analytics, BI, and/or AI/ML roles with a proven track record of leading teams and delivering end-to-end data and AI products.
- Hands-on experience with cloud data and AI platforms such as Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, along with expertise in modern data warehousing and lakehouse architectures.
- Proficiency in BI ecosystems including Power BI, Tableau, or Qlik.
- Practical experience in building and operationalizing machine learning solutions, including MLOps practices like monitoring, drift detection, CI/CD, and model registry.
- Exposure to Generative AI use-cases such as copilots, retrieval-augmented generation, and summarization, with a solid understanding of Responsible AI, privacy, and security considerations.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits

- Relevant certifications in analytics, cloud, or AI technologies are highly desirable, such as Azure Data Scientist/AI Engineer, AWS ML Specialty, Google Professional ML Engineer, or Power BI certifications.
- The position is based at the Corporate Office in Karachi.
- National Foods Limited is an equal opportunity employer, committed to providing a workplace free from discrimination based on age, color, origin, disability, race, religion, gender, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable laws.