About the role

Founding Engineering Manager at Salla building and leading a new AI-focused team. Responsible for product innovation to maximize merchant value through AI-powered products.

Responsibilities

Identify, scope, and prioritize AI product opportunities that directly impact merchant revenue, retention, or operational efficiency
Develop a rolling roadmap of AI-powered experiences validated against merchant needs, market dynamics, and business impact
Define success metrics for each initiative and kill or scale projects based on data, not momentum
Ship your first product within the first quarter — we value velocity and learning over perfection
Build on top of existing AI infrastructure across the department — your job is to create products, not rebuild engines
Establish a rapid prototyping and validation cadence: concept → prototype → merchant pilot → scale or kill
Build and develop a versatile team that blends data science, engineering, and product thinking
Create a team culture of experimentation, merchant obsession, and fast iteration
Partner across the AI department to leverage generative AI capabilities, recommendation signals, and platform infrastructure for new product surfaces
Work closely with product, design, and business stakeholders to ensure AI experiences translate into merchant outcomes
Coordinate with ML platform and operations teams for infrastructure needs without building parallel systems

5+ years in engineering or ML roles, with at least 2 years managing a team that shipped
AI/ML-powered products (not just models or infrastructure — products used by real customers)
Track record of 0-to-1 product development: you’ve taken something from concept to production and measured its impact
Strong product instinct — you can identify what to build, not just how to build it. You think in terms of merchant outcomes, not technical capabilities
Hands-on technical depth in at least one of: LLM applications, recommendation systems, or ML-powered product features. You don’t need to write every line of code, but you need to make sound architectural calls and earn your team’s technical respect
Comfort with ambiguity — you’ll define the roadmap, not inherit one
Experience working in or building for e-commerce, marketplace, or merchant-facing
**Strong Preference:**
Experience with MENA markets, Arabic-language AI products, or regional commerce patterns (seasonal dynamics, WhatsApp commerce, social selling)
Background at a high-growth technology company where you operated with startup speed and increasing scale
Familiarity with multi-agent architectures or AI agent platforms
Arabic language proficiency (business-level or native)