Arabic Multimodal Search Relevance Recovery Leader

The mandate

The search executive departed after an English-led multimodal release was expanded across Gulf markets despite weak Arabic acceptance evidence. It improved headline engagement but confused dialect intent, over-weighted visually similar properties and surfaced amenities contradicted by structured inventory, producing customer complaints, partner disputes and a disputed conversion narrative that the existing dashboard cannot resolve.

The interim must take the Dubai seat within three weeks for ten months. A permanent regional search appointment will open after the recovered evaluation suite governs two releases, with six weeks allocated for the successor to observe a peak-period decision and then chair the third release council under the interim’s documented handover.

The assignment closes when Arabic, English and code-switched search journeys have segment-specific quality and harm corridors; three consecutive releases satisfy offline, human-review and controlled-online gates; content conflicts are traceable to source; and the successor signs the residual dialect, image and inventory risk register. Aggregate click-through improvement cannot replace those conditions.

The leader may pause relevance launches, reweight the approved experiment portfolio, quarantine unreliable labels, change external annotation capacity and move up to AED 25 million within the search budget. Product withdrawal, permanent leadership hires, supplier commitments above AED 8 million and changes to marketplace ranking policy need council approval; the interim cannot suppress safety or accessibility attributes to lift conversion.

Advertising rank, hotel contracting, booking-engine replacement and general customer-service transformation sit beyond this brief. The work covers query understanding, image-text grounding, inventory consistency, relevance measurement and the decision machinery connecting these systems to regional product releases.

Why this seat is open

The failed expansion exposed a governance model in which global benchmark improvement could overrule regional language and content evidence. Once the responsible executive left, product and science leaders defended incompatible accounts of the result. Temporary authority is required to rebuild a trusted measurement system before the company appoints a lasting regional search owner.

What you will own

• Reconstruct the release impact by dialect, code-switch pattern, device, journey intent, image dependency and property-content quality rather than one regional average.
• Establish a protected Arabic evaluation set with provenance, reviewer agreement, cultural and accessibility cases, contamination controls and scheduled refresh rules.
• Decide how text relevance, visual similarity, structured inventory and verified partner content arbitrate when their signals conflict.
• Introduce launch gates joining offline retrieval quality, fluent human judgment, harm checks, guarded experiments, complaint signals and reversible rollback.
• Rebuild annotation operations around dialect competence, hard-case escalation, blind review, adjudication evidence and measurable label drift.
• Resolve the economics of heavier models, regional retrieval, re-ranking and image processing against latency, compute, conversion and customer-remediation costs.
• Transfer the evaluation registry, disputed decisions, supplier posture, launch calendar and talent assessment through a successor-led peak release.

Candidate qualifications

• Held executive or enterprise-director authority for Arabic search, recommendation, language AI or multimodal discovery serving multiple Middle Eastern markets.
• Recovered a failed relevance release by reconciling offline measures, fluent reviewer evidence, controlled experiments and customer outcomes.
• Built evaluation coverage across dialectal Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, English and code-switching with defensible annotation quality.
• Governed text-image grounding where visual cues, structured attributes and merchant or partner content produced contradictory ranking signals.
• Made serving-cost and latency trade-offs across retrieval, ranking and multimodal models without sacrificing signed customer-protection constraints.
• Completed a permanent handover after resetting a multilingual AI product’s release, data and regional decision rights.

Non-negotiables

• Can start in Dubai within three weeks, work on site four days weekly initially and travel monthly to a nominated regional market.
• Brings direct production ownership of Arabic AI relevance; translation programme or English-only search leadership does not satisfy the requirement.
• Will preserve negative regional findings and fluent-review dissent even when they delay a global launch or contradict the commercial narrative.
• Must disclose current travel-platform, annotation, search-vendor and regional content-partner relationships before interviews.

1. 49 words maximum. Give your earliest Dubai start date and any obligation that prevents full-time authority during the first six months.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe an Arabic relevance failure you found below an improving aggregate metric and the release decision you made.
3. 49 words maximum. Which evidence would make you stop a multimodal search launch despite positive click-through and conversion tests?