AI Lead

About the job

Head of AI Transformation

The Company

Toters is an on-demand e-commerce and delivery platform that enables customers to get anything in their city with the highest level of convenience.

Technology is at the heart of everything we do. Our product and engineering teams work every day to build experiences that make customers' lives easier while continuously improving internal systems to deliver faster and at the best cost.

If you're excited about working in a high-growth startup environment and want to be part of a team shaping the future of how people shop in the Middle East, we'd love to hear from you.

About the Role

Are you ready to make AI leverage a company's defining competitive advantage? As a Head of AI Transformation at Toters, you'll transform how we build software, unlock every function to build with AI, and compound our proprietary data and intelligence into product and business outcomes.

The role sits above day-to-day line management and is accountable for outcomes, cross-org alignment, and unblocking. You'll own direction, standards, and outcomes, while delivery is co-owned with our platform and area teams.

In this role, you will:

Your mandate spans four workstreams.

AI-native software development

• Own the strategy and operating model for AI across planning, development, review, testing, and release.
• Take our internal AI development harness to maturity across every engineering team, and define reusable AI workflows for our main types of engineering work.
• Own AI governance: guardrails, code review policy (including reducing human review load where AI review quality supports it), validation standards for AI-generated code, and cost and usage visibility per team.
• Deliver velocity with safety, measured by cycle time, review load, defect trends, and cost per unit of output.

Everyone is an AI builder.

• Grow our internal AI building platform beyond engineering, activating domain experts across Product, Operations, Finance, and Commercial as builders.
• Shape a Forward-Deployed Engineering function that finds high-value opportunities across the business and lands them as working AI solutions.
• Build a compounding intelligence layer of shared context, prompts, patterns, and learnings that makes every new build faster than the last.
• Drive adoption, measured by live use cases, functions actively building, and time from idea to working tool.

AI-native internal tooling

• Make the AI-native path the default for building internal and admin tools, with the traditional engineering queue as the exception.
• Partner with our admin platform and Design System teams so AI-built tools compose with shared foundations rather than fragmenting them.
• Free up engineering capacity, measured by engineer-hours per month, moved from low-complexity internal requests to strategic work.

AI-powered customer features

• Enable product teams to ship customer-facing AI features, partnering with our Applied AI platform on personalization, semantic search and recommendations, fraud intelligence, and intelligent spend.
• Set the bar for production AI: evals, guardrails, degradation paths, and measurable business attribution for every AI feature.
• Deliver shipped product impact: AI features live across multiple product domains with attributable gains in conversion, retention, or efficiency.

Across all workstreams

• Drive alignment with engineering, product, and business leaders, and clear the blockers that slow adoption.
• Act as Toters' technical reference on AI, guiding architecture decisions and evaluating tools, models, and vendors.
• Mentor engineers and builders across the company to raise AI fluency and engineering excellence.
• Report progress, trade-offs, and results clearly to leadership.

Key Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including several years setting technical direction across multiple teams at Staff or Principal level.
• Hands-on experience building and shipping production LLM systems: retrieval, agents and tool use, evals, and guardrails.
• Deep, daily experience with AI-assisted development tools, and a track record of driving their adoption across engineering teams.
• Strong system design and backend foundations, with the depth to review architecture across services, data, and infrastructure.
• Experience defining engineering standards, governance, or operating models and getting them adopted at organization level.
• A data-driven approach to measuring engineering productivity and business impact (e.g., DORA metrics, A/B testing).
• Proven ability to influence without authority across engineering, product, and business functions.
• Strong English communication skills and the ability to explain AI trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to Have

• Production ML experience in personalization, search and recommendations, or fraud detection.
• Experience enabling non-engineers to build with AI or low-code tools.
• Experience managing LLM cost, usage, and vendor strategy at scale.
• Experience as a Tech Lead Manager or leading a small engineering team.
• Familiarity with PHP (Laravel), PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS.
• Previous experience with food delivery, e-commerce, or on-demand platforms.
• Public work on AI engineering: talks, writing, or open-source contributions.

Why Toters?

• Define how a high-growth company builds with AI, with company-wide scope and direct backing from leadership.
• Flexible work environment with hybrid-friendly roles.
• Opportunity to lead impactful initiatives and shape technical strategy.
• Collaborate with talented engineers while growing your career.
• Strong culture of mentorship, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Direct impact on products used by thousands of customers every day.
• Competitive compensation package.
• Exclusive discounts on Toters orders.
• First-class medical insurance.