Head of AI Engineering
Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE
Salary: Up to 100,000 AED/month All-Inclusive (Tax Free)
The Mission: Architecting the World's First AI-Native State
Most organizations are trying to add AI to existing legacy workflows. Our client is doing the opposite. They are rebuilding the entire fabric of governance from the ground up to be AI-native.
This is not a research lab or a centre of excellence focused on white papers. This is an AI Factory. Our client manages a portfolio of over 15 concurrent productsspanning multiple varying internal stakeholders serving 80,000+ users across 45+ entities.
We are seeking a Cautious Renegade to lead the AI Engineering function, decouple it from traditional software engineering, and scale it into a world-class powerhouse.
The Technical Vanguard
As Head of AI Engineering you will lead the AI/ML and data engineering function within the AI Factory, responsible for designing, building, and deploying the intelligence layer that powers AI-native products. This mandate bridges cutting-edge AI research with applied production engineering, requiring deep expertise in LLM orchestration, agentic systems, and high-scale RAG pipelines. You will be the architect of the infrastructure and Ops layer (MLOps / LLMOps / AgentOps) that ensures advanced AI capabilities are delivered reliably, safely, and at a sovereign scale.
The Mandate
As the Head of AI Engineering, you will report directly to the CTO-designate and sit on the senior leadership team. You aren't just executing a roadmap; you are defining the strategy, resource allocation, and the very blueprint of what AI-native engineering looks like at a national scale.
Your Core Pillars:
- Build the AI Lane: Transition AI engineering from a sub-discipline of software engineering into a standalone function. You will scale the team from its current core to 2025 elite engineers by year-end.
- Applied AI at Scale (80/20 Split): Your North Star is shipping. While experimentation is part of the weekly rhythm, 80% of your energy is focused on production-grade Gen AI solutions, high-fidelity voice products, and robust Arabic LLM pipelines.
- Agentic Orchestration: Move beyond simple RAG. You will lead the development of agentic applications involving complex context management, long-term memory, and multi-agent orchestration.
- AI-Native Developer Experience: You will define the benchmark for modern engineering. Our client looks to the workflows of Cursor, Windsurf, and Anthropic as their North Stars. Your team will use agents and coding assistants to automate the full value chain of inputs, outputs, and evaluations.
The Stack & Scope
- Breadth over Niche: You will oversee a massive portfolio. One week you are optimizing a judicial decision-support tool; the next, you are refining a procurement agent or an Arabic voice interface for citizen services.
- Rapid Cycles: Our client operates on a quarterly strategic release cycle, moving toward high-velocity 6-week product sprints.
- Sovereign Infrastructure: You will have direct access to high-tier GPU clusters and dedicated AI/ML Ops teams to ensure models are performant, secure, and sovereign.
The Profile: The Cautious Renegade
We are seeking a rare hybrid: someone with the soul of a disruptor but the discipline of a systems architect.
- Proven Ship-Record: You have led engineering for a scalable B2B or B2C AI product that is currently live. You know what production-grade actually means (and how it differs from a demo).
- Technical Depth: You can dive into the nth-level detail on model quantization or agentic loops with the Director General, then pivot to discuss visionary product strategy with the Chairman.
- The Translator: You can take a vague business pain point from a non-technical stakeholder and translate it into a concrete technical architecture without losing the why.
- Process Navigator: You understand that working at the sovereign level involves high-stakes security and infra cycles. You have the patience to navigate these without losing momentum.
- Ambiguity Addict: There is no playbook for an AI-native government. You don't want a defined scope; you want the autonomy to draw the lines yourself.
Why Join This Mission in Abu Dhabi
The UAE has positioned itself as the global capital of AI. Here, you aren't fighting for budget or battling legacy debt in a dying industry. You are backed by a visionary leadership that treats AI as a matter of national importance.
- Autonomy: You are part of the leadership team deciding how to build, who to hire, and what to ship.
- Frontier Work: This is work with no precedent. If you want a clear, pre-trodden career path, look elsewhere. If you want to be the person who wrote the manual on AI-governance, this is your seat.
