Machine Learning Engineer

Join Kavak UAE as a Machine Learning Engineer and play a crucial role in building, running, and maintaining the ML infrastructure that powers the company’s pricing strategy. You will develop automated systems for mapping market listings to catalog SKUs, refine pricing algorithms, and create models that enhance pricing accuracy, strategy, and margin. Your work will transform manual, person-dependent processes into reliable, measurable systems that are regularly retrained and improved.

Key Responsibilities:
- Build and maintain the listing-to-SKU mapping engine using rules, text matching, classifiers, 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.
- Manage the local pricing algorithm by monitoring performance, running experiments, improving accuracy, reducing bias, and reporting results.
- Design backtests, holdout sets, and audit samples to measure 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 the warehouse, scrapers, catalog, 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 ML engineering or applied data science, with at least two models deployed to production.
- Background in e-commerce, marketplaces, automotive, fintech, or any pricing/valuation domain.
- 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.
- Strong technical skills in Python ML stack (pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM, PyTorch or TensorFlow).
- Expertise in SQL and data handling on platforms like BigQuery, Databricks, or similar cloud warehouses.
- 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.
- Solid understanding of statistics and evaluation methods including holdout/backtest design, calibration, confidence intervals, and A/B testing.
- Familiarity with MLOps tools and practices: Docker, scheduled pipelines (Airflow or similar), experiment tracking, model registry (MLflow or Weights & Biases), monitoring, and retraining.
- Experience with automated data quality validation tools like Great Expectations.
- Engineering best practices including Git with CI/CD, code reviews, and testing.
- Cloud experience with GCP or AWS.
- Computer vision skills in fine-grained image classification, transfer learning, image embeddings, and vision-language models.
- Experience with large language models (LLMs) and vector search technologies such as FAISS or vector databases for structured data extraction.
- Knowledge of pricing analytics, 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 experience using REST APIs with FastAPI.
- Web scraping expertise using Scrapy or Playwright, including handling site layout changes and compliance with site terms of use.
- Reporting skills with dashboard tools like 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.
- Specializations from DeepLearning.AI.
- Proficiency in Arabic language is a plus.

If you are passionate about applying machine learning to solve complex pricing challenges and want to be part of an innovative team driving the future of automotive marketplaces, this opportunity at Kavak UAE is for you. Apply now to contribute to a dynamic and fast-growing environment.