Lead AI and Data Platform Engineer - Marketplace

About the Company and Platform

This position is with a stealth-mode startup focused on the Middle East market, offering a combined live commerce and social marketplace experience. The platform integrates livestream shopping, social interaction, real-time auctions, seller and buyer tools, secure transactions, and buyer protections to create an engaging digital marketplace.

The company is developing a highly automated, AI-driven data platform providing buyers tailored shopping experiences, sellers advanced growth tools, and internal teams operational efficiencies through automation.

Role Overview

The Lead AI and Data Platform Engineer will directly own the design, construction, deployment, and iterative improvement of the platform's AI, data, and growth automation infrastructure. This hands-on role spans data engineering, event tracking, AI workflows including large language model (LLM) integration, recommendation engines, marketing data activation, lifecycle automation, and internal AI tooling.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain a central high-performance data warehouse (e.g., ClickHouse), ensuring comprehensive coverage of buyers, sellers, auctions, orders, payments, marketing attribution, and engagement data.
• Create robust ETL pipelines transforming raw event data into clean datasets, dashboards, user segments, alerts, and automation workflows.
• Establish event tracking frameworks across web and mobile platforms, live streams, auctions, commerce, and social features, including schema definitions and identity resolution.
• Develop data infrastructure to activate buyer and seller segments in paid marketing and CRM channels with support for major platforms (Meta, Google, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.) and advanced attribution to link campaigns to actual marketplace GMV.
• Implement lifecycle marketing automations including personalized triggers, multi-channel communications, message timing intelligence, frequency capping, and suppression logic to optimize user engagement.
• Design, build, and manage AI-powered workflows for seller onboarding, content moderation, campaign generation, support routing, and operational automation, integrating LLMs and cutting-edge AI tools with production-grade reliability.
• Develop ranking and recommendation algorithms for live shows, products, sellers, and notifications to support personalized discovery experiences.
• Enhance live commerce workflows using AI for transcription, translation, content summarization, clip generation, and performance analysis to boost seller success and audience retention.
• Support programmatic SEO with AI-enhanced multilingual content generation, metadata management, and search relevance optimization while maintaining brand safety and quality standards.
• Ensure MLOps and LLMops best practices including deployment monitoring, prompt versioning, evaluation, cost control, and error handling are implemented for scalable and secure AI production services.
• Develop data governance frameworks focusing on privacy, access control, consent management, and data retention in compliance with policy and legal standards.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration, converting business goals into technical requirements and mentoring engineers to shape data and AI best practices, building the foundation for a growing AI & data team.

Required Qualifications

• At least 7 years of professional experience in roles related to software, data, AI, machine learning, or data platform architecture.
• Expert proficiency in Python and SQL with strong skills in designing scalable, maintainable data models.
• Demonstrated experience building production data pipelines and analytics architectures with OLAP databases such as ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or Apache Druid.
• Deep understanding of comprehensive event tracking, telemetry systems, behavioral data modeling, user identity resolution, and implementing data quality monitoring.
• Hands-on integration of large language models, AI APIs, or AI-driven features into scalable production systems.
• Experienced in backend development for data-driven services, APIs, and automation workflows.
• Strong knowledge of marketing data activation, segmentation, lifecycle automation, multi-channel attribution, and campaign performance measurement.
• Proven ability to collaborate with marketing and growth teams to improve targeting, personalization, and ROI through data insights.
• Comfort with cloud infrastructure technologies, API design, containers, CI/CD, logging, and monitoring to ensure production reliability.
• Excellent communication skills to convey technical concepts and trade-offs effectively to leadership, product, and cross-discipline teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior usage or expertise with ClickHouse.
• Background in marketplaces, e-commerce, social commerce, livestreaming platforms, auctions, or other high-volume transactional consumer applications.
• Experience developing recommendation systems, personalization engines, search ranking, scoring models for buyer and seller intelligence, feed and notification ranking algorithms.

Additional Information

This role is fully remote and open to candidates residing anywhere globally, including North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The person will possess autonomy and thrive in a fast-paced startup environment with a strong sense of ownership over the AI and data platform roadmap.