Forward Deployed AI Engineer

About the role

This is an on-site position in Abu Dhabi, UAE. We are looking for a hands-on Forward Deployed AI Engineer to build and operate production agentic AI systems within a complex operational business.

You will work directly with stakeholders and a cross-functional engineering squad to understand business challenges, translate them into practical technical requirements, and deliver solutions from discovery and design through implementation, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement. This is a build-first individual-contributor role with end-to-end engineering responsibility for assigned solutions.

What you will do

Understand before you build

• Collaborate directly with stakeholders to translate operational needs into clear technical requirements, constraints, and delivery priorities.
• Contribute across discovery and solution design, then implement, deploy, operate, and continuously improve the resulting systems.
• Challenge assumptions, identify underlying operational drivers, and recognize when AI is not the appropriate solution.

Agentic AI solution development

• Design, build, deploy, and continuously improve enterprise-grade agentic AI applications as the primary engineering approach.
• Develop AI agents capable of multi-step reasoning, tool and API orchestration, context management, exception handling, and human-in-the-loop workflows at enterprise scale.
• Implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation solutions, including data ingestion, chunking, vector representations, vector search, retrieval optimization, grounding, and source traceability.
• Connect AI systems to enterprise platforms through Model Context Protocol (MCP), REST APIs, OpenAPI specifications, webhooks, messaging, and event-driven architectures.
• Create reusable, self-service AI services and interfaces that can support multiple business domains.
• Apply structured LLM engineering practices, including tool calling, schema validation, retries, fallbacks, guardrails, and clear recovery paths.

Quality, reliability and governance

• Take responsibility for the quality of assigned solutions through testing, evaluation, observability, structured logging, version control, and continuous feedback mechanisms.
• Optimize deployed solutions across accuracy, reliability, performance, security, latency, and cost.
• Apply security, privacy, access-control, auditability, responsible-AI, and governance requirements throughout solution design and operation.

Delivery and collaboration

• Work closely with product owners, AI architects, engineers, and business stakeholders across discovery and delivery.
• Implement robust multi-agent systems, agent-to-agent communication patterns, tool-orchestration flows, and evaluation frameworks within the agreed solution architecture.
• Contribute reusable components, documented patterns, implementation guidance, and operational runbooks that other engineers can adopt.
• Participate in design discussions, code reviews, testing, release preparation, production troubleshooting, and post-release improvement.
• Communicate delivery progress, technical risks, dependencies, and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Required skills and experience

• Demonstrated curiosity and a strong drive to understand complex business and operational challenges before proposing a solution.
• A business-first, human-centered approach that treats AI as a way to augment people rather than replace them.
• Excellent English communication skills and experience working effectively in diverse, international teams.
• Strong experience building production-grade software, including practical delivery with Generative AI, Large Language Models, or applied machine learning and hands-on experience designing and deploying agentic AI solutions.
• Proven ability to deliver AI applications from requirements and design through implementation, deployment, and production support.
• Strong Python programming skills and expertise in at least one additional language: TypeScript/JavaScript, Java, or C#.
• Hands-on experience or strong working knowledge of MCP for connecting AI agents with systems, tools, APIs, and data sources.
• Practical experience with one or more modern agent orchestration frameworks or enterprise AI platforms.
• Strong understanding of asynchronous programming, API development, typed data validation, CI/CD, testing strategies, source control, logging, and error handling.
• Experience with vector databases or search platforms and production RAG patterns.
• Experience integrating enterprise systems through APIs, managed identities, middleware, webhooks, messaging queues, and cloud-native architectures.
• Practical experience deploying containerized solutions in cloud environments with monitoring and observability.
• Strong judgment across quality, latency, reliability, security, governance, and cost trade-offs.

Will be a plus

• Experience in aviation, transportation, logistics, supply chain, cargo operations, customer service, or other complex operational environments.
• Background in classical machine learning, data science, or advanced analytics.
• Full-stack engineering experience across front-end, API, and back-end systems.
• Experience with Voice AI, email automation, CRM integrations, workflow automation, or multilingual AI solutions.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks, golden datasets, simulation-based testing, regression suites, and AI quality-measurement systems.
• Experience designing multi-agent architectures, agent registries, agent-to-agent communication, and tool-orchestration standards.
• Experience working effectively with external AI platforms, startups, or technology providers as part of a broader delivery team.
• Relevant certifications in cloud AI, Generative AI, agentic AI, MLOps, or related disciplines.

Work model and relocation

The role is full-time and onsite in Abu Dhabi, UAE, for an initial one-year assignment with possible extension. The selected candidate will be employed through the designated UAE company. Planned support includes the UAE employment visa, employee medical insurance, an initial flight to the UAE, a return flight at the end of the assignment, an approved broker fee, apartment-search assistance and local arrival support (subject to the final written offer).