Manager Data and AI

National Foods Limited is embarking on a significant growth journey, focusing on strengthening its brands, financial position, global reach, and commitment to sustainability. We are seeking a dynamic leader to head the Data & AI function within our 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 our federated organizational structure, security standards, compliance requirements, and business goals.

Key Responsibilities

- Collaborate with the Head of ERP & Application to define and execute the enterprise-wide Data & AI strategy, ensuring it aligns with business priorities.
- Own and maintain the Data & AI roadmap, managing use-cases, platforms, governance, prioritization, value tracking, and delivery cadence within a federated model.
- Partner with business leaders to identify, assess, and implement high-impact analytics, AI/ML, and Generative AI use-cases, translating them into scalable data and AI products.
- Lead the design of analytics and AI solutions, including data pipelines, semantic layers, model serving frameworks, and integration with business workflows.
- Manage the development of semantic layers and curated datasets, ensuring data validation, structure, and readiness for business use with clear KPI definitions.
- Work closely 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, while promoting adoption and consistent user experience standards.
- Build, deploy, and operationalize machine learning models for forecasting, segmentation, optimization, and risk management, establishing MLOps practices like CI/CD, model registry, monitoring, drift detection, quality checks, and version control.
- 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 including quality, grounding, toxicity, and bias.
- Define and enforce Responsible AI principles and governance controls in collaboration with Cybersecurity, Legal, and Compliance teams, focusing on model risk, approvals, documentation, explainability, and auditability.
- Ensure compliance with data governance policies, quality standards, naming conventions, metadata management, lineage practices, and KPI frameworks.
- Establish standardized workflows for project intake, discovery, proof-of-concept to production criteria, product documentation, and post-deployment value measurement.
- Provide hands-on coaching and guidance on tools and best practices 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-related queries.
- Manage relationships with vendors and implementation partners for analytics and AI tools, cloud services, model platforms, and platform upgrades, including license and subscription administration.
- Ensure adherence to cybersecurity, privacy, and audit requirements related to data access, reporting layers, models, and AI applications.
- Track product adoption and business impact by monitoring usage, value realization, service level agreements, and quality KPIs; prepare performance reports for leadership review.

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, business intelligence, and/or AI/ML roles with proven leadership in delivering end-to-end data and AI products.
- Hands-on expertise with cloud data and AI platforms such as Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, along with modern data warehousing and lakehouse architectures.
- Proficient 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 pipelines, and model governance.
- Familiarity with Generative AI use-cases such as copilots, retrieval-augmented generation, and summarization, along with a strong understanding of Responsible AI, privacy, and security considerations.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits

- Relevant certifications in analytics, cloud, or AI such as Azure Data Scientist/AI Engineer, AWS ML Specialty, Google Professional ML Engineer, or Power BI certifications are highly desirable.
- The position is based at the Corporate Office in Karachi.
- National Foods Limited is an equal opportunity employer, committed to diversity and inclusion regardless of age, color, origin, disability, race, religion, gender, marital status, or any other legally protected characteristic.

This role offers a unique opportunity to lead cutting-edge data and AI initiatives within a globally recognized and sustainability-driven organization.