AI maturity
building
Chief AI Officer
VP & Head of AI Lab
RAKBANK · Financial Services / Retail Banking · 📍 United Arab Emirates
RAKBANK is standing up a dedicated AI Lab and needs a senior executive to lead it end-to-end, signaling a strategic pivot to make AI a core competitive differentiator in UAE retail and commercial banking.
Reports to
CTO
Company stage
public
Source
linkedin
Key responsibilities
- Establish and lead RAKBANK's AI Lab, defining vision, strategy, and operating model
- Drive development and deployment of AI/ML products across retail and commercial banking verticals
- Build and manage a multidisciplinary team of AI researchers, engineers, and data scientists
- Partner with business units to identify high-value AI use cases and translate them into production solutions
- Represent AI capabilities to senior leadership, regulators, and external stakeholders
Requirements
- Proven track record leading an AI lab, AI center of excellence, or large applied AI team
- Deep expertise in machine learning, generative AI, and/or NLP in a production environment
- Experience in financial services or highly regulated industry
- Executive stakeholder management and cross-functional leadership skills
Signals
- ⚠ No salary or compensation details posted
- ⚠ No job description body provided — scope and KPIs are entirely unclear
- ⚠ No previous postings from this employer — zero institutional signal on hiring patterns
- ⚠ Title is VP not C-suite, which may limit organizational authority needed to drive enterprise AI transformation
- ✓ Creating a dedicated AI Lab signals serious institutional commitment and likely budget
- ✓ RAKBANK is a well-capitalized public bank with digital transformation ambition in a tech-forward UAE market
- ✓ UAE government AI strategy (UAE National AI Strategy 2031) creates regulatory tailwind and urgency
- ✓ Head-of-lab mandate suggests greenfield authority to shape culture, tooling, and team