VP of Engineering & Infrastructure

About This Role

VP of Engineering & Infrastructure

On-site | Abu Dhabi

AppliedAI Co is a fast-growing Enterprise AI SaaS company delivering mission-critical AI solutions to large-scale enterprise clients across the region and globally. We operate at the intersection of advanced AI, robust cloud infrastructure, and enterprise-grade reliability — and we're building the team to match our ambition.

The Role

We are looking for an exceptional VP of Engineering & Infrastructure to own the full technical delivery layer of our business. This is a hands-on leadership role designed for someone who has built and scaled enterprise SaaS platforms, led engineering teams with clarity and rigour, and understands what it means to operate infrastructure where performance, security, and auditability are non-negotiable.

This role will work closely with the CEO / CTO and Senior Leadership Team, and is positioned to grow significantly and potentially into a CTO role, as the company scales.

What You'll Own

Platform & Architecture

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture of the company's AI SaaS platform, ensuring it is enterprise-grade, modular, and built to scale
• Lead architectural decisions across cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, AI/ML model serving, and multi-tenant SaaS layers
• Drive the evolution from current state to a best-in-class, future-proof architecture — including API design, microservices, and containerisation strategies
• Evaluate and make authoritative build vs. buy decisions in alignment with product and business strategy

Infrastructure & Scalability

• Oversee cloud infrastructure (AWS / Azure / GCP or hybrid) with a focus on high availability, fault tolerance, and horizontal scalability
• Architect and enforce parallel execution and distributed compute frameworks suitable for AI workload bursts and enterprise SLA commitments
• Ensure the platform can scale reliably to enterprise volumes without degradation in performance or security posture

Security & Compliance

• Implement and maintain enterprise-grade security standards including zero-trust architecture, encryption at rest/in transit, RBAC, and secrets management
• Lead the company's posture on compliance frameworks relevant to enterprise procurement — including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and regional data sovereignty requirements (including UAE PDPL and relevant TDRA/NESA guidelines)
• Serve as the internal authority on penetration testing, vulnerability management, and security incident response

Auditability & Observability

• Build robust audit logging and traceability across the platform — ensuring every AI action, user interaction, and data access is fully traceable for enterprise clients and regulators
• Champion observability best practices: distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting, and dashboarding (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Grafana)
• Own SLA/SLO frameworks and lead post-incident reviews with a blameless engineering culture

Engineering Team Leadership

• Build, mentor, and retain a world-class engineering team — managing senior engineers, tech leads, DevOps/SRE, and QA functions
• Establish engineering operating rhythms: sprint cadences, code review standards, incident management, on-call rotations, and technical roadmap ceremonies
• Drive a culture of technical excellence, documentation, and continuous improvement
• Act as a strong recruiter and talent magnet — knowing how to attract and develop exceptional engineers in a competitive market

Cross-functional & Executive Collaboration

• Partner closely with Product to translate business requirements into technically sound delivery plans with clear timelines and dependencies
• Represent engineering at the senior leadership level — providing clear, honest, and commercially aware technical guidance to non-technical stakeholders
• Participate in client-facing technical conversations, enterprise procurement due diligence, and security questionnaire responses as required

What we're looking for:

• Must-Have10+ years of engineering experience, with at least4–5 years in senior engineering leadership (Head of Engineering, VP Eng, or equivalent)
• Proven track record building and scaling Enterprise B2B SaaS platforms— ideally with AI, ML, or data-intensive workloads
• Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture and modern infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or equivalent)
• Strong command of security frameworks and enterprise compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, or regional equivalents)
• Experience designing systems for high concurrency, parallel execution, and horizontal scalability at enterprise load
• Demonstrated ability to build and lead engineering teams of 10+ across multiple functions (backend, DevOps/SRE, QA)
• Fluency in audit trail design and observability tooling in production environments
• Strong communicator — able to translate technical complexity into business language for leadership and clients

Highly Desirable

• Experience operating within or serving enterprise clients in the GCC / MENA region
• Familiarity with UAE and GCC data sovereignty, privacy, and cybersecurity regulations(NESA, PDPL, ADHICS)
• Background in or exposure to AI/ML productionisation— model deployment, inference optimization, LLM integration, vector databases, or RAG pipelines
• Exposure to multi-region deployments and sovereign cloud or private cloud configurations for regulated industries
• Prior experience as a CTO or in a CTO-track role

Personal Attributes

• High ownership mentality — takes accountability for outcomes, not just activities
• Decisive under ambiguity — comfortable making architectural calls with incomplete information
• Commercially aware — understands that engineering exists to serve the business
• Collaborative and low-ego — builds trust across teams and with clients
• Based in or willing to relocate to the UAE