Everyone quotes LinkedIn numbers when they talk about hiring in the Gulf. LinkedIn shows you what recruiters post, filtered through an algorithm, weeks after the fact.
I wanted the source. So I pulled 503 open roles straight from the applicant tracking systems behind seven Gulf employers' own career pages, on a single day in July 2026. No job boards in the middle. No login. Just the same public APIs those career pages call from your browser.
Here is what the raw data says.
Abu Dhabi is out-hiring Dubai, and it isn't close
Of the 152 Gulf-based roles in the dataset:
| City | Open roles | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Abu Dhabi | 70 | 46% |
| Dubai | 50 | 33% |
| Riyadh | 22 | 14% |
| Kuwait City | 6 | 4% |
| Muscat | 2 | 1% |
| Doha | 1 | 1% |
Dubai gets the attention. Abu Dhabi is doing the hiring. A large part of that is Aldar and Masdar, both Abu Dhabi anchors, both hiring hard into real estate and clean energy. If you are a job seeker who filters on "Dubai" by reflex, you are filtering out the larger half of this market.
Nearly half of all roles are mid-senior
| Seniority | Roles | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-Senior level | 68 | 45% |
| Mid level | 33 | 22% |
| Executive | 24 | 16% |
| Entry level | 20 | 13% |
| Internship | 4 | 3% |
| Director | 3 | 2% |
This is the finding that should change how you read the Gulf market. Only 16% of these roles are entry level or internships. The Gulf is not, at least at these companies, hiring juniors in volume. It is hiring people with five to fifteen years of experience, and it is hiring a striking number of executives: 24 VP and C-suite roles across seven companies.
That executive share tells you something specific. Companies posting Senior Vice President roles publicly are building new business units, not backfilling.
Who is hiring right now
| Company | Gulf roles | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Aldar Properties | 48 | Abu Dhabi |
| Tamara | 31 | Dubai, Riyadh |
| Deliveroo | 26 | Dubai |
| Masdar | 23 | Abu Dhabi |
| Careem | 11 | Dubai |
| Fresha | 9 | Riyadh |
| Lean Technologies | 4 | Riyadh |
Sales leads the functions at 23 roles, followed by data at 13 and marketing at 11. Engineering is only 6. In the Gulf, at these companies, commercial roles outnumber technical ones by a wide margin. That runs against the instinct that a fintech like Tamara or a tech company like Careem is mostly hiring engineers.
The part nobody tells you: most Gulf giants cannot be scraped
I started with 42 of the region's most sought-after employers. Emirates Group, ADNOC, Emaar, Majid Al Futtaim, Qatar Airways, DP World, Emirates NBD, Aramco, Chalhoub, e&, stc, NEOM, Mubadala, talabat, noon.
Only 7 of the 42 were reachable.
The rest run on Taleo, Oracle Cloud, Phenom, or fully custom portals. None of those expose a public job API. If you have ever wondered why job aggregators show stale or incomplete listings for the biggest Gulf employers, this is why. The data simply isn't available at the source, so aggregators scrape it secondhand from job boards, with all the lag and loss that implies.
The seven that are reachable share one trait: they run modern applicant tracking systems, Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, and SmartRecruiters, which all publish open job board APIs by design.
| ATS | Gulf roles found |
|---|---|
| Lever | 57 |
| Greenhouse | 42 |
| Ashby | 30 |
| SmartRecruiters | 23 |
Two ways the data tried to lie to me
Building this taught me to distrust my own classifiers.
"Assistant Vice President" is not an executive. In Gulf banking and real estate, AVP is an upper-mid individual contributor title. My first pass classified 37 roles as executive. Aldar alone had seven Assistant Vice Presidents. Once I separated AVP from SVP, the real executive count dropped to 24.
"Coordinator" contains "coo". A naive substring match for C-suite abbreviations classified "Emirati Programme Coordinator" as a chief operating officer. Likewise "Partner Onboarding Specialist" matched "partner" and got promoted to firm partner. Both needed word-boundary matching.
If you are doing this yourself: every seniority heuristic you write will be wrong in a way that flatters your numbers. Print the titles behind every bucket before you publish a percentage. I nearly published "18% of Gulf roles are executive level," which was an artifact of the string "coo" appearing inside "Coordinator."
Reproduce this yourself, free
The scraper is a free, open Apify Actor. It auto-detects which ATS a company uses, so you can pass a career page URL or just a company name.
{
"companies": [
"lever:aldar",
"greenhouse:careem",
"greenhouse:tamara",
"smartrecruiters:masdar",
"ashby:deliveroo"
],
"locationFilter": "Dubai"
}
That returns 50 live Dubai jobs the moment you run it. It costs nothing because these are the companies' own public APIs. No proxies, no browser, no rate limits worth worrying about.
Run the free ATS Jobs Scraper on Apify
If you need the Gulf employers that aren't on a modern ATS, the ones running Taleo and Oracle, I built a separate tool that reaches them through Bayt, GulfTalent and NaukriGulf and merges the duplicates: GCC Jobs Aggregator.
Method
All 503 roles were pulled on 10 July 2026 from the public job board APIs of Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby and SmartRecruiters. A role counts as "Gulf" when its location string names a GCC city or country. Seniority and function are inferred from job titles, so treat them as a strong signal rather than ground truth. The scraper is free and the classification code is open, so you can check my work and disagree with it.
I plan to rerun this quarterly. If you want a specific company added, say so in the comments and I will check whether it is reachable at all.
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