Machine Learning Engineer

KAVAK, the leading e-commerce platform for buying and selling pre-owned vehicles in Latin America, is expanding its footprint into the GCC region, including the vibrant market of the Middle East. Known for offering the easiest, safest, and most transparent car trading experience, KAVAK is rapidly growing its team to build innovative technology, processes, and products that revolutionize the automotive market worldwide. As part of this exciting journey, we are seeking a skilled Machine Learning Engineer to develop and maintain the ML infrastructure that powers Kavak UAE’s pricing system, transforming manual processes into reliable, automated solutions that enhance pricing accuracy, strategy, and margin.

Key Responsibilities:
- Build and maintain the listing-to-SKU mapping engine using rules, text matching, and classifiers, incorporating confidence thresholds and human review queues.
- Develop an image-based car identification model to classify make, model, year, generation, and trim for listings lacking usable text data.
- Manage 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 provide segmented reports.
- 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 and kilometer 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 on data access, deployment, and prioritization.

Required Qualifications:
- 3 to 5 years of experience in machine learning engineering or applied data science, with at least two models successfully deployed to production.
- Background in e-commerce, marketplaces, automotive, fintech, or any pricing/valuation domain.
- Proficiency in 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.
- Strong technical skills including:
- Python ML stack (pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM, PyTorch or TensorFlow)
- SQL expertise on cloud data warehouses such as BigQuery or Databricks
- Pricing models including regression and quantile regression with prediction intervals
- Text matching and entity resolution techniques (normalization, fuzzy matching, tokenization, embeddings)
- Statistical evaluation methods including holdout/backtest design, calibration, confidence intervals, and A/B testing
- MLOps tools such as Docker, Airflow (or similar), MLflow or Weights & Biases, with monitoring and retraining pipelines
- Automated data validation tools (e.g., Great Expectations)
- Engineering best practices: Git with CI/CD, code reviews, and testing
- Cloud platforms like GCP or AWS
- Computer vision expertise in fine-grained image classification, transfer learning, and vision-language models
- Experience with LLMs and vector search technologies (FAISS or similar) for structured data extraction and matching
- Pricing analytics including price elasticity and survival analysis for days-to-sell
- Human-in-the-loop systems using labeling tools (Label Studio, CVAT) and active learning
- Model serving using REST APIs (FastAPI)
- Web scraping with Scrapy or Playwright, including handling site layout changes and compliance with terms of use
- Reporting tools such as Looker Studio, Streamlit, or Databricks dashboards

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

Join KAVAK and be part of a fast-growing, innovative team that is transforming the automotive market globally. If you are passionate about machine learning and eager to work in a dynamic, technology-driven environment, we encourage you to apply and contribute to our exciting journey.