Careem is building the Everything App for the greater Middle East — making it easy to move around, order food and groceries, manage payments, and more. Our purpose is simple: to simplify and improve people’s lives and build an awesome organisation that inspires. Since 2012, Careem has enabled earnings for over 2.5 million Captains, simplified the lives of more than 70 million customers, and built a platform where the region’s best talent and entrepreneurs thrive. We operate in 70+ cities across 10 countries, from Morocco to Pakistan.

We’re now entering our next chapter — one powered by AI. We’re looking for AI talent: curious problem-solvers who know how to apply AI to build tools, automate workflows, and create real impact. Whether it’s streamlining operations, enhancing customer experience, or reimagining internal systems — we want people who can make Careem work smarter and move faster.

About the Role

We’re looking for senior technical leaders who can architect and scale intelligent systems that architect the "brain" of our dark store operations. As a senior data scientist you won’t just be building models, you’ll be optimizing the lifecycle of millions of items from the moment they leave a supplier to the moment they reach a customer’s doorstep in under 20 minutes. You will tackle the classic "perishable trade-off" ensuring our shelves are always stocked with what customers want, while ruthlessly minimizing wastage and maximizing every square centimetre of our dark store floor space.

What You'll Do

Demand Forecasting: Build and deploy high-precision forecasting models to predict hyper-local demand at the SKU-store level.
Inventory & Availability: Develop replenishment algorithms that balance In-Stock Availability with the risk of expiry, specifically for high-turnover perishables.
Wastage Mitigation: Use ML to identify items at risk of expiring and trigger automated interventions including reduced-to-clear discounting, intra-store replenishment etc.
Dynamic Pricing & Discounts: Design and A/B test pricing strategies that move inventory efficiently without eroding margins.
Space Management: Optimize dark store space determining which items should be stored where within the dark store to minimize picker travel time and maximize storage density.
End-to-End Ownership: Work closely with Product Managers and Supply Chain Operations to turn your models into production-level code that dictates real-world logistics.

What You'll Need

Academic Background & Experience: 8+ years of experience in Data Science, ideally in E-commerce, Q-commerce, or Supply Chain. A background in Operations Research or Statistics. Hands-on proficiency in Python, Spark and ML frameworks. Experience with real-time inference systems and model monitoring in production. Strong understanding of experimentation, A/B testing, and causal inference. Demonstrated ability to drive architectural decisions across teams.
Technical Skills: Professional-grade Python and SQL. Experience with optimization libraries (like Gurobi, CPLEX, or PuLP) and ML frameworks (XGBoost, LightGBM, or PyTorch).
Problem Solving: Experience with Stochastic Optimization or Reinforcement Learning for inventory management is highly preferred.
Business Intuition: You understand that a 1% reduction in wastage across 100+ stores translates to millions in saved EBITDA.
Communication Skills: Excellent communication skills and ability to translate complex modelling trade-offs into business impact.

What We’ll Provide You

We offer colleagues the opportunity to drive impact in the region while they learn and grow. As a full time Careem colleague, you will be able to:

Work and learn from great minds by joining a community of inspiring colleagues.
Put your passion to work in a purposeful organisation dedicated to creating impact in a region with a lot of untapped potential.
Explore new opportunities to learn and grow every day.
Work 4 days a week in office & 1 day from home, and remotely from any country in the world for 30 days a year with unlimited vacation days per year. (If you are in an individual contributor role in tech, you will have 2 office days a week and 3 to work from home.)
Access to healthcare benefits and fitness reimbursements for health activities including gym, health club, and training classes.