Market Research Associate

About Dune Strategy
Dune Strategy is a management consulting firm advising international investors, family groups and sovereign-linked entities on commercial decisions across the GCC. The firm is deliberately small: a limited number of active engagements at any one time, so partners stay close to the work and the research behind it reaches the people making the call. Much of the value sits in getting the details right about how a market, a family structure or a regulator behaves.
The Market Research Associate supports that work. Paid-click demand is one of the ways this firm reads a market: what people search for, what they pay to be found, and which competitors are buying attention in a given category. This role sits with that demand data and turns it into material a partner can use in a client conversation. It is a permanent, full-time position, fully remote, working from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

What You Will Do

• Build and maintain search and paid-click datasets that show how demand for a product, sector or region is moving.
• Map counterparties and competitors: who is advertising, what they promise, and what that says about their commercial position.
• Assemble briefing material for partner-led conversations, with the numbers checked and the source for each one clear.
• Track a regulatory or policy path over time and flag when something changes that affects a live piece of work.
• Write short notes that a partner can open ten minutes before a meeting and rely on.
• Keep research files organised so that a claim made last month can be traced and defended later.

What We Are Looking For

• Clarity of thought: you can take a messy question and break it into a few things worth checking.
• Basic knowledge of market research methods, from studies, an internship, a side project or a first job.
• Writing that holds up, in English, with sentences that say what you mean and no padding.
• Confident use of spreadsheets and a willingness to learn new research and advertising tools as the work requires.
• A pragmatic streak: you know when a number is good enough to act on and when it needs another pass.
• Comfort with incomplete information, and the patience to keep digging rather than fill the gap with a guess.

Helpful Background

• An interest in finance, economics, politics or how businesses make decisions about new markets.
• Familiarity with search advertising dashboards, keyword tools or web analytics.
• Any prior research work, whether a university project, a placement or a job in a related field.
• Arabic or another regional language, which helps when reading local sources and filings.
• Exposure to a sector such as retail, real estate, logistics or financial services.

What the role offers

• Fully remote work, with the position based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
• Permanent, full-time employment.
• Direct exposure to partners and to the commercial conversations where decisions are shaped.
• The chance to learn how complex regional markets and sovereign capital work, from the inside of live engagements.

After a year, the person in this role should be able to run a briefing on their own: take a question, find the demand evidence, work out what it means commercially, and put it in front of a partner without a rewrite. They will know which counterparties matter in a given sector and which numbers a client will push back on. They will spot the commercial call early, often before the final data is in, and be trusted to say so. That is the standard the firm works to, and it is the standard this role is measured against.