Proudly recognized as a Great Place to Work®, we are an AI-native customer experience platform purpose-built for emerging markets. With more than 25 years of conversational AI research and development, we serve over 5,000 enterprises across MENA and are pioneering sovereign, agentic AI through our Agentic Studio platform. As the category takes shape, the way Unifonic is perceived — by buyers, analysts, media, and the broader market — is a strategic asset. This role owns that perception.
As an AI Engineering Manager, you will lead the team behind Unifonic's marketing and personalization AI, building the intelligence that determines who to engage, through which channel, at what time, and with what message. This is a hands-on leadership role that combines people management with technical ownership, ensuring the delivery of scalable, production-grade AI solutions while fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the technical owner on AI model design, architecture, and integration for marketing and personalization use cases across the Unifonic product ecosystem.
- Own the technical roadmap for personalization AI, recommendation and next-best-action engines, customer segmentation and propensity models, campaign and send-time optimization, and generative AI for content personalization.
- Lead the evaluation, selection, and implementation of AI/ML frameworks, tools, and best practices, ensuring scalability, robustness, and maintainability.
- Participate in hands-on coding, solution prototyping, and code reviews to maintain high-quality standards and guide the team through complex technical challenges.
- Oversee and refine the AI development lifecycle, including model training, validation, deployment, experimentation (A/B and uplift testing), and ongoing improvement.
- Lead a team of AI engineers, providing mentorship, regular feedback, and career development support.
- Define clear performance expectations, conduct performance reviews, and identify growth opportunities for team members.
- Foster a positive, inclusive, and high-performance team culture that encourages innovation, continuous learning, and collaboration.
- Collaborate with recruitment and HR to identify, attract, and retain top AI engineering talent, ensuring the team’s ongoing growth and success.
- Work closely with the Director of AI Development, Product Managers, Designers, Data Scientists, and other Engineering leaders to translate business requirements into technical roadmaps and actionable engineering plans.
- Ensure seamless integration of AI capabilities into existing and future products, partnering with platform, infrastructure, and DevOps teams to optimize deployment and operations.
- Communicate technical topics effectively to non-technical stakeholders, making recommendations and reporting progress, risks, and opportunities.
- Implement and continuously improve the development processes, standards, and tools that drive efficiency, reliability, and scalability.
- Ensure adherence to best practices in model governance, performance monitoring, and compliance with relevant data privacy and security regulations, including regional data residency requirements.
- Monitor engineering metrics and KPIs, leveraging data-driven insights to improve development velocity, code quality, and team efficiency and connect model performance to marketing outcomes such as conversion, engagement, and retention.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- 8+ years of software development experience with at least 3 years focused on AI/ML engineering and related technologies.
- Demonstrated experience building and shipping marketing or personalization AI in production recommendation systems, customer segmentation, propensity/churn/LTV modeling, real-time decisioning, or campaign optimization with measurable impact on business KPIs.
- Proven track record of leading, mentoring, or managing engineering teams, preferably in high-growth or innovative tech environments.
- Hands-on experience with a range of AI/ML frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch), advanced modeling techniques (NLP, LLMs and generative AI, recommendation and ranking systems), and production-grade model deployments.
- Solid grounding in experimentation and measurement, A/B testing, uplift modeling, and evaluating model impact on conversion, engagement, retention, and ROAS.
- Proficiency in Python, cloud platforms (e.g., OCI, AWS, GCP), CI/CD workflows, and modern software engineering practices.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to motivate teams and build productive cross-functional relationships.
- A strategic and solution-oriented mindset, capable of balancing technical depth with big-picture thinking.
Nice to have
- Experience with MarTech ecosystems, customer data platforms (CDPs), campaign orchestration, marketing automation, or CPaaS/omnichannel messaging platforms.
- Experience applying LLMs to marketing use cases, content generation, conversational commerce, or agentic customer journeys including fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), ideally within the Hugging Face ecosystem (Transformers, PEFT, tokenizers, and the model hub).
- Exposure to Rust for performance-critical AI services, such as low-latency inference, real-time decisioning, or high-throughput data pipelines.
- Arabic NLP experience or familiarity with the MENA market.
- Experience scaling teams and systems in a high-growth SaaS environment.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and bonus
- Unifonic share scheme (we are all owners!)
- 30 holiday days after the first anniversary
- Your Birthday off!
- Spend up to 25 days per year working from anywhere in the world!
- Paid leave for new parents
Additional details
- We thrive on creativity, collaboration, and fun, where every idea is welcomed and celebrated. As shareholders in the company, we’re more than just communicators—we’re innovators shaping the future together. We are Unifones.
- Our Engineering team is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining the systems and technologies that drive Unifonic’s solutions. We work closely with other departments to ensure our products and services meet the needs of our customers.
- Craft & Toolkit: Machine Learning & Deep Learning, Generative AI & LLMs, Recommendation Systems & Personalization, Customer Segmentation, Propensity & Churn Modeling, Python, TensorFlow / PyTorch, Hugging Face & RAG, AWS / GCP / OCI, MLOps & CI/CD, A/B Testing & Model Evaluation, Software Architecture & System Design, AI Engineering Leadership & Team Management
- Character Traits: Analytical thinking and problem-solving, Ownership and accountability, Communication, Collaboration, Adaptability and learning, Mentorship and knowledge sharing, Resilience, Quality and attention to detail, Advocacy and innovation
Zobhira
