Product Manager - Data & AI

Soum is a rapidly expanding B2C marketplace headquartered in Riyadh, specializing in connecting buyers and sellers of used electronics and cars throughout Saudi Arabia via its website and mobile app. Built on a foundation of trust, Soum ensures buyers have confidence in their purchases while sellers receive fair and prompt payments. With the recent introduction of a subscription model for electronics and vehicles, Soum is positioning itself as the leading recommerce platform in the Kingdom.

Key Responsibilities
- Define and own the Data & AI product roadmap, ensuring every initiative aligns with clear commercial outcomes such as GMV, margin, conversion rates, operating costs, or fraud reduction.
- Lead the development of pricing and valuation products for used electronics and cars, including instant seller quotes, price recommendations, and dynamic pricing influenced by condition, demand, seasonality, and market trends.
- Identify, evaluate, and implement AI/ML use cases across the business, such as search ranking, personalized recommendations, fraud and risk scoring, image-based condition grading, LLM-powered listing creation, and bilingual customer support automation.
- Manage the data platform as a product by collaborating closely with data engineering teams on pipelines, data models, warehouses, and event tracking, maintaining high standards for data quality, lineage, documentation, and access control.
- Remain hands-on with data by writing SQL queries, exploring datasets, specifying tracking schemas and data contracts, reviewing data models, and validating that solutions meet business needs.
- Translate complex business problems into well-defined machine learning and analytics challenges, collaborating with data scientists and ML engineers to establish evaluation metrics, success criteria, and operational guardrails.
- Build strong business cases and make strategic build-versus-buy decisions, considering ROI, inference costs, and infrastructure requirements, including third-party LLM APIs versus in-house models.
- Drive adoption of data products across commercial, operations, finance, and leadership teams by enabling self-serve analytics, trusted KPI definitions, and actionable dashboards.
- Monitor launched models and data products for performance, data drift, quality, and business impact, iterating rapidly to address any shortcomings.
- Ensure responsible and compliant use of data and AI in accordance with Saudi Arabia’s Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) and SDAIA guidelines, incorporating privacy, human-in-the-loop, and bias mitigation controls.
- Communicate complex technical trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders and leadership, fostering alignment around priorities.

Required Qualifications
- 2 to 4 years of product management experience, with a significant focus on data platforms, ML/AI products, or data-intensive solutions.
- Deep technical understanding comparable to a data engineer, including advanced SQL, data modeling (dimensional/star schema), ETL/ELT processes, event tracking, and familiarity with modern data stacks such as BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, dbt, Airflow, and Kafka.
- Solid grasp of the ML lifecycle and modern Generative AI techniques, including problem framing, feature engineering, model evaluation, MLOps, and working with LLMs (e.g., retrieval-augmented generation, prompt design, vendor APIs).
- Strong commercial acumen with a proven ability to link data or AI products to revenue, margin, or cost improvements and to develop compelling business cases.
- Demonstrated experience shipping AI/ML or data products into production with measurable business impact beyond prototypes.
- Ability to independently drive product direction, unblock teams, and make timely, well-informed decisions.
- Excellent communication skills, able to effectively collaborate with engineers, data scientists, and commercial leaders.
- Fluent in English; Arabic language skills are a plus.

Preferred Qualifications
- Previous experience as a data engineer, analytics engineer, or data scientist before transitioning into product management.
- Background in pricing engines, marketplaces, e-commerce, automotive sectors, fintech risk, or fraud management.
- Experience with computer vision or Arabic natural language processing (NLP) applications.
- Familiarity with PDPL, data governance frameworks, or the GCC data regulatory environment.

Soum leverages AI tools to assist in the recruitment process, such as reviewing applications and analyzing resumes, but all final hiring decisions are made by human recruiters to ensure fairness and accuracy.