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

• 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.