Senior Data Engineer
Data engineers building the pipelines, warehouses and feature stores that GCC AI teams ship on top of.
Data engineering mandates have grown faster than any other category in our practice over the last 18 months. The pattern is consistent — clients hired their data scientists and ML engineers first, and are now hiring the data engineers who let those teams ship.
Senior Data Engineers in the GCC own the pipeline layer end-to-end — ingestion, transformation, warehousing, feature serving — inside organisations that are still moving from legacy data infrastructure to modern stacks.
What you'll typically own
- Design and operate data pipelines that ML systems depend on — typically batch and streaming.
- Own the warehouse / lakehouse architecture: Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery-equivalent stacks.
- Build feature stores and the serving layer used by ML engineers.
- Migrate legacy data infrastructure — most clients are mid-migration from Oracle / SAP-era warehouses.
- Partner with ML, analytics, and business teams on data contracts, SLAs, and quality.
Profile fit
Must have
- 6+ years building production data systems.
- Strong on at least one modern warehouse / lakehouse stack (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery).
- Pipeline orchestration — Airflow, Dagster, or equivalent — at scale.
- Comfort with both batch and streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, Spark Streaming).
- Track record on data quality, observability, and lineage.
Nice to have
- Experience with feature stores (Tecton, Feast, in-house equivalents).
- Prior work inside regulated industries — banking compliance, healthcare PHI, government.
- Arabic language capability.
- Migration experience — Oracle to cloud, SAP to lakehouse, on-prem to hybrid.
Indicative package
Total fixed monthly base, tax-free. Housing, transport and schooling allowances typically add 25–35% on top.
| UAE · AED · per month | KSA · SAR · per month | |
|---|---|---|
| Senior (6–10 yrs) | AED35,000–48,000/mo | SAR30,000–40,000/mo |
| Senior+ (10–15 yrs) | AED48,000–55,000/mo | SAR40,000–45,000/mo |
| Bonus typical | AED15–25% | SAR15–25% |
USD equivalent: approximately $98,000–$180,000 per year before bonus.
Location & corridor
KSA
Riyadh primary, Jeddah secondary. On-site 4–5 days typical.
UAE
Dubai (commercial, banking) and Abu Dhabi (sovereign, energy, healthcare). Hybrid more accessible than KSA.
Visa & relocation
Full sponsorship is standard. Family visa, schooling allowance and health cover are typically included. Spouse work authorisation is straightforward in UAE; KSA depends on employer.
Get on our radar for this role.
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