Lead Specialist Data Science & Analytics II📣 Job Ad

About the Lead Specialist, Data Science & Analytics II Role

Ma’aden is seeking a Lead Specialist, Data Science & Analytics II to serve as a technical leader and senior practitioner. This full-time role, based in Riyadh, will drive the development, deployment, and scaling of Machine Learning, AI, and advanced analytics solutions across the organization. The position requires 5-10 years of experience and focuses on ensuring analytics products deliver measurable value across mining, processing, operations, and enterprise functions.

Core Responsibilities and Delivery

The Lead Specialist will own the end-to-end lifecycle of Machine Learning and AI initiatives, from problem framing and data exploration to model development, validation, and MLOps handover. This includes delivering scalable, production-grade models aligned with enterprise data governance and AI standards. Collaboration with data engineering is essential to design and maintain reliable data pipelines, ensuring data accuracy and trustworthiness. The role also involves driving experimentation, model versioning, automated retraining, and continuous improvement.

Translating Business Needs into Analytics Solutions

A key aspect of this role is establishing frameworks and operating models that embed data science capabilities within business and technical functions, making them accessible and scalable. The Lead Specialist will engage with business unit and domain stakeholders to identify value creation opportunities and translate them into actionable analytics use cases. This involves building value hypotheses, defining KPIs and success criteria, and developing solution roadmaps in partnership with Data & AI leadership and business teams.

Industrialization and Governance of AI/ML Models

This position requires partnering with data engineering, data platforms, and cloud/OT architecture teams to integrate models into enterprise systems and operational layers. The Lead Specialist will set standards for production deployment, testing, monitoring, drift handling, and lifecycle governance, ensuring seamless integration of predictive and optimization models into enterprise platforms, control systems, and digital twins. The role will leverage machine learning, optimization, and computer vision to drive improvements in performance, reliability, and sustainability.

Responsible AI, Quality, and Stakeholder Engagement

Ensuring compliance with Ma’aden’s Responsible AI, data quality, and data governance frameworks is critical. This includes promoting reproducibility, documentation, lineage tracking, and auditability across all data science assets, as well as ensuring transparency and explainability. The Lead Specialist will communicate insights, results, risks, and recommendations to decision-makers through compelling narratives and visualizations, and track value realization, adoption metrics, and operational impact to demonstrate measurable benefits.

Qualifications and Experience

Candidates should possess a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field. The role requires 6+ years of experience in Data Science/Advanced Analytics, with a preference for industrial, mining, or heavy-asset environments, including at least 2 years in a leadership or mentoring capacity. Strong proficiency with modern ML frameworks and cloud platforms (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Azure, AWS) is essential, as is technical fluency with modern analytics stacks, data modeling, and SQL. Practical experience with Generative AI solutions and their integration into enterprise processes is also required. Experience designing and maintaining data pipelines across IT and OT environments, exposure to sensor and streaming data, and familiarity with model deployment and lifecycle management are key requirements.