Senior AI Engineer

About SWORD

Role and mission

Technology environment

• The stack is Microsoft-first: Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, M365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Power Platform.
• UAE sovereign cloud is used for hosted open-weight models; security, data residency, and regulatory compliance are non-negotiable.
• The role description says on-site in Abu Dhabi; company-wide benefits also mention hybrid or remote work.

Solution delivery and projects

• Design and build LLM applications, RAG pipelines, multi-agent workflows, and ML models from prototype to production.
• Translate business problems into scoped solutions, integrate AI with enterprise systems, and define MVPs and measurable success criteria.
• Manage project scope, plans, milestones, budgets, risks, reporting, and coordination with business owners, IT, InfoSec, and procurement.

Vendors, operations, and governance

• Evaluate vendors and integrators, challenge proposals and estimates, and ensure delivery, quality, and knowledge transfer.
• Build ingestion, embedding, retrieval, evaluation, and deployment pipelines; implement CI/CD, monitoring, logging, cost tracking, and model-quality evaluation.
• Own production reliability, incident handling, and continuous improvement of deployed agents and models.
• Apply risk assessment, human-in-the-loop design, access control, audit trails, security reviews, data-residency rules, and UAE regulatory requirements.

Technical leadership

• Set engineering standards, reusable components, and reference architectures; mentor junior engineers and data scientists through reviews and pairing.
• Evaluate models, platforms, and vendors, and present recommendations to leadership.

Qualifications and experience

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related field.
• 6+ years in software, data, or ML engineering, including at least 2 years building and deploying LLM applications.
• Proven record of shipping enterprise AI solutions to production and strong hands-on Microsoft AI stack experience.
• Experience leading AI or digital projects end to end and managing technology vendors and system integrators.
• Regulated-industry experience is a plus; Azure, architecture, project management, PRINCE2, or Agile certifications are a plus.

Required and preferred technical skills

• Must-have Microsoft tools: Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Copilot Studio, and Power Automate.
• Must-have GenAI skills: prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, tool calling, and agents using Semantic Kernel or Microsoft Agent Framework.
• Must-have programming and ML: production-quality Python, SQL, REST APIs, classical ML, scikit-learn, XGBoost, and evaluation methodology.
• Must-have operations, data, and security: Azure DevOps or GitHub, CI/CD, Docker, LLM monitoring and evaluation, data pipelines, data quality, structured and unstructured data, Entra ID, Key Vault, and prompt-injection mitigation.
• Nice-to-have skills include Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Fabric, fine-tuning, open-weight hosting, MCP, C#, TypeScript, time series, Azure AI Document Intelligence, Bicep or Terraform, AKS, MLflow, Databricks, Oracle, AI red-teaming, and Microsoft Purview.

Candidate behaviors

Working at SWORD

• The company describes a dynamic and supportive environment, international exposure, learning from a global team, major projects, and possible relocation to a regional SWORD office.