Principal Engineer, Applied AI - TAX Free - Abu Dhabi Based

Principal Engineer – Applied AI

Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE (relocation support provided if needed)

We are seeking a Principal Engineer – Applied AI to serve as one of the definitive technical voices with one of our clients. In this high-impact, non-managerial role, you will set system-wide technical direction, make high-stakes architectural decisions across multiple engineering teams, and continuously raise our engineering ceiling through hands-on leadership and mentorship.

If you thrive on solving the hardest cross-system problems, establishing production AI standards, and building resilient architecture for frontier AI applications, this role is for you.

Responsibilities in this role:

• Technical direction. Set the architecture for systems that span multiple teams, and lead the decisions too consequential for any one team and too technical to settle by process. Make the call, write it down, defend it.

• Inference and serving. GPU-based serving on sovereign infrastructure with vLLM,

TGI or TensorRT-LLM, tuned for latency, throughput and a cost per token you can defend.

• Retrieval and agents. Reference RAG and agent architecture the organisation builds

against, with a clear-eyed view of what is production ready and what is still research.

• Backend platform. Service boundaries and API contracts, event-driven infrastructure (Kafka, Azure Service Bus or Event Hubs), PostgreSQL at scale, Kubernetes on Azure, and the reliability and SLO work that prevents incidents rather than answering them.

• Evaluation as engineering. Offline and online evaluation and regression detection, so the organisation can change models, prompts and retrieval without flying blind.

• Depth in the work. Read the code, run the experiment, build the prototype that settles the argument, and lead the design reviews and cross-system incidents that set the bar.

• Multiply the organisation. Grow senior and staff engineers into principal-level operators, build the shared abstractions other teams depend on, and calibrate the technical bar in senior hiring.

Minimum Requirements:

• Staff or principal track record. Years matter less than what you have shipped

across backend and applied AI. We assess on production systems you designed and the evidence they held up.

• Deeply credible. You have designed and shipped production systems other engineers rely on, and in a room of strong engineers your answer carries weight.

• Expert in Python and its production ecosystem, with working proficiency in at least one of Go, Rust, Java or Kotlin and the judgment to know when it beats Python.

• Production AI, not demo AI. First-hand experience of evaluation, non-determinism, model behaviour over time and the operational discipline AI systems demand.

• Current on the landscape. Frontier and open-weight models, RAG and retrieval, agent frameworks, serving infrastructure and evaluation methodology, deep enough to make credible build, buy or partner calls.

• Distributed systems grounding. Consistency, idempotency, back-pressure and retry semantics, with production experience of event-driven architecture and PostgreSQL at scale.

• Hands-on and current. You still read code, still write it where it matters, and use coding agents as a core part of your workflow.