177 Data Governance Officer jobs in the United Arab Emirates

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Data Protection Specialist to join our team.

As a Data Protection Specialist, you will be responsible for leading the development and implementation of our organization's data protection framework.

• Lead data protection risk assessments and implement mitigation measures.
• Develop and maintain internal data protection policies, standards, and regulations.
• Ensure compliance with regional and international data protection laws, such as GDPR, CCPA, and local banking regulations.
• Design and maintain dashboards to monitor privacy performance and incidents.
• Prepare reports and present insights to senior management and regulators.
• Collaborate with IT, legal, and compliance teams to embed data protection best practices across the business.
• Provide training and awareness sessions to staff on their data protection obligations.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Law, Information Security, or a related field.
• 7-10 years of experience in data protection compliance and risk management, preferably in the banking and financial services sector.
• Strong knowledge of data protection regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, and local banking regulations.
• Experience creating data protection dashboards and reporting tools.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Professional certifications, such as CIPP/E, CIPM, and CIPT, are desirable.

Job Title: Compliance Officer - Data Governance

This role is responsible for driving enterprise-wide privacy, data protection, and AI compliance initiatives. The ideal candidate will have a strong understanding of privacy laws, regulations, and industry standards. They will be responsible for ensuring that all services, products, and projects incorporate privacy-by-design principles and meet applicable data protection and AI governance requirements.

• Bachelor's Degree in Law (LLB), Bar admission
• Advanced degree, CIPP / E, CIPM, CIPT, AI certifications
• 4+ years privacy / data protection law; AI compliance expertise; proven independent work ability; process improvement experience
• 8+ years for Director-level; telecom / tech industry; law firm and in-house background

We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, including comprehensive health insurance, retirement savings plan, and generous paid time off. We also provide opportunities for professional development and growth, including training programs and mentorship.

We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applications from diverse candidates. If you require any accommodations during the hiring process, please let us know.

Job Requisition ID:

Established in the 1930s as a trading business, Al-Futtaim Group today is one of the most diversified and progressive, privately held regional businesses headquartered in Dubai, United A"rab Emirates. Structured into five operating divisions; automotive, financial services, real estate, retail and healthcare; employing more than 35,000 employees across more than 20 countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, Al-Futtaim Group partners with over 200 of the world's most admired and innovative brands. Al-Futtaim Group's entrepreneurship and relentless customer focus enables the organisation to continue to grow and expand; responding to the changing needs of our customers within the societies in which we operate.

By upholding our values of respect, excellence, collaboration and integrity; Al-Futtaim Group continues to enrich the lives and aspirations of our customers each and every day.

Overview Of The Role
In a rapidly evolving data and AI landscape, Al-Futtaim Retail is committed to leading transformation across the retail sector by harnessing the strategic power of data and artificial intelligence.

The Chief of Data Strategy & Analytics will be responsible for driving Retail enterprise-wide initiatives that leverage data and AI to enhance business performance, elevate customer engagement, and unlock new growth opportunities.

This role is centered on enabling business transformation—not just through technical execution, but by shaping and steering data-driven strategies that align with Retail Division's commercial objectives. The Chief of Data Strategy & Analytics will lead the development of AI-enabled products and services across the organization's portfolio, ensuring that data becomes a core enabler of innovation, operational excellence, and competitive advantage.

The individual will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams—including business leaders, marketing, data practitioners, and the Group Technology & Digital Platforms (GTDP) team—to translate strategic priorities into scalable data and AI initiatives. They will ensure that business needs are clearly articulated, and that solutions are designed to deliver measurable impact.

This role also involves engaging with executive leadership, functional heads, external partners, and vendors to foster alignment, drive adoption, and ensure successful delivery of data-led transformation programs.

What you will do:
Description of Accountability:

Financial Dimensions:
The Chief of Data Strategy & Analytics of Retail will play a pivotal role in shaping and executing Al-Futtaim Retail's data and AI strategy to unlock new sources of business value. By embedding data and AI capabilities across the business portfolio, this role directly contributes to both
top-line growth
and
bottom-line efficiency
Through strategic planning and leadership of data-driven transformation initiatives, the role will enable

• Revenue Expansion: By identifying and activating AI-powered opportunities that enhance customer engagement, personalize offerings, and open new service lines.
• Cost Optimization: By streamlining operations, improving decision-making, and automating processes through data intelligence.
• Value Realization: By ensuring that data assets are leveraged to drive measurable business outcomes across functions such as sales, leasing, asset management, and customer experience

This role is not only responsible for guiding the strategic direction of data and AI initiatives but also for ensuring their financial impact is tracked, reported, and aligned with division's broader commercial goals.

• Strategic Leadership Lead the development and execution of a data and AI strategy that supports business growth, operational efficiency, and customer-centric innovation.
• Transformation Enablement Champion data-driven transformation initiatives, ensuring that data and AI capabilities are embedded into core business processes, decision-making, and service delivery.
• Business Alignment Collaborate with senior leadership to identify high-impact opportunities where data and AI can deliver measurable business outcomes, such as revenue growth, cost optimization, and risk mitigation.
• Portfolio Oversight Oversee a portfolio of data and AI programs, ensuring alignment with business priorities and managing cross-functional dependencies to deliver value at scale.
• Stakeholder Engagement Act as a bridge between business units and data teams, translating strategic objectives into actionable data initiatives and ensuring stakeholder buy-in and adoption.
• Governance & Ethics Establish and uphold data governance frameworks, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and promoting ethical use of AI across the organization.
• Innovation & Thought Leadership Stay ahead of industry trends and emerging technologies, providing strategic guidance on how innovations in data and AI can be leveraged to maintain competitive advantage.
• Culture Building Foster a culture of data literacy, innovation, and continuous improvement, empowering teams to use data as a strategic asset.

Required Skills To Be Successful

• Strategic Leadership: Ability to define and execute a data and AI strategy that aligns with business transformation goals.
• Business Acumen: Deep understanding of Retail business operations, value drivers, and how data can unlock efficiencies and growth.
• Data Governance & Ethics: Expertise in establishing governance frameworks, ensuring compliance, and promoting ethical AI use.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Skilled in translating business needs into data initiatives and securing cross-functional buy-in.
• Change Management: Proven ability to lead cultural and operational shifts toward data-driven decision-making.
• AI Literacy & Enablement: Familiarity with AI concepts (LLMs, ML, GenAI) and ability to guide non-technical teams in their adoption.
• Portfolio Oversight: Experience managing a portfolio of data and AI initiatives across multiple business units.

What Equips You For The Role

• Master's degree in business administration, Data Science, Economics, or a related field
• Participation in executive data literacy programs and AI strategy workshops is highly valued.
• 12–15 years in data strategy, analytics, or transformation roles, with at least 5 years in a senior leadership capacity.
• Experience in Retail or adjacent sectors with complex data ecosystems.
• Transformation Leadership: Demonstrated success in leading enterprise-wide data modernization or AI-driven transformation programs.
• Proven track record of working with finance, operations, marketing, and technology teams to deliver business outcomes.

We're here to provide excellent service but a little help from you can ensure a five-star candidate experience from start to finish.

Before you click "apply": Please read the job description carefully to ensure you can confidently demonstrate
why
this opportunity is right for you and take the time to put together a well-crafted and personalised CV to further boost your visibility. Our global Talent Acquisition team members are all assigned to specific businesses to ensure that we make the best matches between talent and opportunities. We not only consider the requisite compatibility of skills and behaviours, but also how candidates align with our Values of Respect, Integrity, Collaboration, and Excellence.

As part of our candidate experience promise, we also want to make ourselves available to you throughout the application process. We make every effort to review and respond to every application.

As a Lead Data Architect, you will play a crucial role in developing and implementing a data architecture strategy that enables enterprise-wide interoperability, AI/ML readiness, and regulatory compliance.

• Data Platform Leadership: Develop and implement a data architecture strategy to drive business growth and innovation.
• Lead the evolution of our cloud-based data lake architecture to support structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data types, including FHIR-formatted JSON healthcare data.
• Cloud Data Lake & Storage Optimization: Design scalable, secure, and cost-effective data lakes using Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Athena, Redshift, and Lake Formation.
• Leverage Mountpoint for S3 to enable high-performance access to S3 objects, including vectorized data files.
• Optimize data storage and retrieval strategies for performance and cost-efficiency.
• Ai/ML Enablement and Vector Infrastructure: Collaborate with data science teams to implement embedding models, vectorization pipelines, and real-time inference architectures.
• Design and manage vector storage systems (e.g., S3-based, FAISS, Pinecone) for semantic search and intelligent data access.
• E nsure vectorized data pipelines align with model training, evaluation, and deployment strategies.
• Healthcare Data Architecture & Interoperability: Architect systems to ingest, process, and store FHIR-compliant JSON data from EHRs, APIs, and HL7 sources.
• Ensure conformance with healthcare interoperability standards and optimize for queryability and downstream analytics.
• Implement data normalization and enrichment pipelines for use in both clinical and operational contexts.
• Security, Compliance & Governance: Lead efforts to ensure data security at rest and in transit using AWS-native encryption, IAM, VPC controls, and bucket policies.
• Implement and manage data access controls, audit logging, and role-based security models across AWS environments.
• Oversee data governance, including lineage, cataloging, and stewardship with tools such as AWS Glue Data Catalog or third-party platforms.
• Team Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration: Build and lead a high-performing team of data architects and engineers.

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field.
• 8–12+ years of experience in data architecture with 3–5 years in a technical leadership role.
• Proven experience architecting AWS-based data lakes and analytics pipelines.
• Deep understanding of healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7) and working with FHIR JSON objects in large-scale systems.
• Expertise with embedding and vectorization models, semantic search, and managing vector storage solutions.
• Hands-on experience with Amazon S3, Mountpoint for S3, and optimizing S3-based workloads for performance and cost.
• Strong background in data security, encryption, access control, and compliance frameworks (HIPAA, HITRUST).

The ideal candidate will have experience in statistical and data mining techniques, as well as knowledge of machine learning tools and statistical techniques.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with the team to identify issues and use data to propose solutions for effective decision making
• Build algorithms and design experiments to merge, manage, interrogate and extract data to supply tailored reports to colleagues or customers
• Use machine learning tools and statistical techniques to produce solutions to problems
• Test data mining models to select the most appropriate ones for use on a project
• Maintain clear and coherent communication, both verbal and written, to understand data needs and report results
• Create clear reports that tell compelling stories about how customers work with the business
• Assess the effectiveness of data sources and data-gathering techniques and improve data collection methods
• Horizon scan to stay up to date with the latest technology, techniques and methods
• Conduct research from which you'll develop prototypes and proof of concepts

Required Skills and Qualifications:

• Experience and knowledge in statistical and data mining techniques using (e.g., Python, R, SQL)
• Experience and knowledge in applying advanced Machine Learning techniques (e.g., Neural networks, supervised and unsupervised ML, computer vision and image processing, text analysis)
• Experience and knowledge in big data analysis and management and distributed computing tools (e.g., Hadoop, Hive, Spark)
• Experience and knowledge in one or more programming languages (C, C#, Java)
• Experience and knowledge in web development frameworks (javascript, React, node.js)
• Experience analyzing data from 3rd party providers: (e.g., Google Analytics, Site Catalyst, Facebook Insights)
• Experience visualizing/presenting data for stakeholders using: Periscope, Business Objects, D3, ggplot, etc.
• Experience working with and creating data architectures
• Knowledge of a variety of machine learning techniques (clustering, decision tree learning, artificial neural networks, etc.) and their real-world advantages/drawbacks
• Knowledge of advanced statistical techniques and concepts (regression, properties of distributions, statistical tests and proper usage, etc.) and experience with applications
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for coordinating across teams
• A drive to learn and master new technologies and techniques
• Willingness to learn new technology
• Able to work independently on researching solutions and applying findings

Overview

We are looking for a highly analytical and business-minded Business Analyst with 2-3 years of experience, ideally with a background in market research and operational analysis. In this role, you will partner closely with cross-functional teams to turn complex data into actionable business insights that drive decision-making, operational efficiency, and strategic growth.

• Analyze internal and external data to identify trends, assess performance, and support business strategy;
• Conduct in-depth market research and competitive analysis to inform product and growth decisions;
• Translate data insights into clear, actionable recommendations that support execution across product, marketing, and operations;
• Build and maintain dashboards, business reports, and performance metrics to monitor KPIs and key initiatives;
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define data requirements and support business planning;
• Participate in forecasting, scenario modeling, and business case development;
• Provide ad hoc insights and data support for strategic and operational projects;

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Economics, Data Science, Statistics, or a related field;
• 2-3 years of experience in data analytics or business analysis, with strong exposure to market research;
• Proficient in SQL and at least one analytical tool (e.g., Python, R, Excel);
• Experienced with BI platforms such as Tableau, Power BI, or Looker;
• Strong business acumen and ability to connect data findings to real-world decisions and outcomes;
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence stakeholders across departments;

• Experience in a crypto exchange, fintech, or fast-growing tech company;
• Familiarity with user behavior data, growth metrics, and financial KPIs;
• Understanding of web or mobile analytics platforms (e.g., Google Analytics, Mixpanel);

Our organization is seeking a Data Strategy Consultant to collaborate closely with business stakeholders and IT teams. The ideal candidate will possess strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, as well as excellent communication, presentation, and negotiation skills.

• Evaluate client data strategies and specific use cases.
• Collaborate with clients to understand their data-related challenges, objectives, and requirements.
• Develop a comprehensive data roadmap focusing on data sharing and AI implementation.
• Examine the current data operating model, including functions, skills, processes, and department interactions.
• Design a future data operating model, including detailed descriptions of functions, processes, governance structures, and tooling enablers.
• Analyze the current data architecture, including cloud infrastructure and existing data platforms.
• Conduct interviews with business stakeholders to understand their use-case requirements and needs, focusing on AI and data sharing.
• Identify and launch initiatives for data quality improvement.

Desired Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or master's degree in data science, computer science, information systems, or related fields.
• MBA or equivalent advanced degree preferred.
• Minimum 5 years in data consulting or related roles, with at least 3 years in senior/managerial positions.
• Proven track record managing large-scale complex data initiatives with measurable outcomes.
• Deep understanding of business impact through the use of big data technologies, AI, and machine learning.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Strong communication, presentation, and negotiation skills.
• Relationship-building with executive stakeholders.
• Results-oriented strategic thinking.
• Strong Consulting toolkit.

The Chief Data Strategy Officer will lead the development and implementation of cutting-edge data management tools and processes to ensure the reliability and accuracy of our databases and solutions. This role involves overseeing the design and delivery of our innovation strategy for advanced data analysis, AI, and machine learning.

• Develop and implement comprehensive strategies for data collection, management, and analysis to support decision-making and reporting.
• Lead projects on the use of advanced analytical methods to interpret complex data sets and translate raw data into actionable insights and recommendations.
• Promote the use of Big Data and emerging technologies (AI, ML, NLP) to improve data availability and provide innovative indicators for real-time analysis.
• Establish clear guidelines on data quality and integrity.
• Ensure the implementation of robustness and quality processes for data outputs to promote high-quality analysis.
• Lead the automation and optimization of data processes to ensure timeliness and reduce inefficiencies.
• Monitor the development and delivery of data solutions and innovation strategy.
• Identify and test the adequacy of emerging technologies and trends.
• Monitor ethical and reputational risks linked to the use of cutting-edge technologies.
• Identify optimization and automation opportunities and supervise data governance.
• Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to foster knowledge exchange and sharing.
• Design the innovation strategy aligned with our objectives and goals.

• A minimum of 10 years of relevant experience in an innovation role, preferably in an international or regional context.
• Proven experience in developing and managing large-scale data products and innovative initiatives.
• Bachelor's degree in data science, big data, or related fields is required.
• Master's degree or PhD in data science, big data, or related field is preferred.
• Excellent communication and writing skills in Arabic and English. French, as a third language, is a solid advantage.

We offer a competitive package of benefits aligned with our employment policies, including a tax-free salary and supplementary allowances such as housing, furniture, and air ticket, schooling, and comprehensive medical insurance.

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.