Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Location: Abu Dhabi (Hybrid)

Type: Contract - 12 months+

About the opportunity

We're partnered with a leading AI company in the UAE building agentic AI products at scale, with access to world-leading models and resources.

This is a hands-on engineering role at the core of their production AI systems. You'll develop, deploy and optimise the ML and LLM-powered models that power live products used across critical sectors. Real production work, not demos or sandboxes.

What you'll do

• Develop, train and deploy ML models and LLM-powered systems that power live AI products
• Work with state-of-the-art techniques, LLMs, RAG, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, in real business contexts
• Build and ship LLM-powered applications end-to-end, from model to deployed API
• Partner with cross-functional teams to translate business challenges into production AI
• Continuously monitor, evaluate and optimise models against real-world performance
• Implement and manage robust data pipelines for high-quality, reliable input

What we're looking for

• 5+ years in ML or AI engineering with real production experience
• Strong Python, with hands-on experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications (FastAPI/Flask, REST, websockets)
• Proven work with LLMs and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA), RAG, and agentic systems
• Experience with modern ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn) and orchestration libraries (LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex)
• Comfortable with SQL/NoSQL and vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector) for semantic search
• A track record of applying ML to real, business-critical problems

Background we love (not required, but a strong signal):

A competitive-coding background (Kaggle, ACM/ICPC, IOI, TopCoder), a strong technical degree, or experience shipping LLM products at a serious AI company.

How the team works

• Elite environment of ex-FAANG and frontier-lab engineers
• What matters is what you ship, not the hours you spend
• Low ego, high standards. The best idea wins, whoever it comes from
• Minimal bureaucracy, you talk to whoever you need to talk to

The setup

• Abu Dhabi, hybrid working
• Contract-based, Staff level
• Competitive rates
• Moving fast, onboarding in the coming weeks

Interested

Send your CV or DM me directly for a confidential conversation.