Senior Software Engineer

Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

About Us:

AI71 is an applied research team dedicated to creating helpful and responsible AI agents for knowledge workers. Working closely with our industry partners, our cross-functional teams of AI experts build products grounded in the cutting-edge research of our colleagues from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII).

About the Role:

This role will contribute to developing industry-leading AI software using cutting-edge research breakthroughs. As a software engineer, you will design, implement, launch, and land code in an innovative and fast-paced environment, with a combination of horizontal (platform) and vertical (project, product development) responsibilities. You will be responsible for building and maintaining infrastructure for advanced AI systems (including LLMs, RAG, data pipelines, databases).

You will develop software and infrastructure with a focus on long-term maintainability, while also driving prototyping, live experimentation, iterating on user quality metrics, leveraging and contributing to powerful technologies/infrastructure (e.g., LLMs, GenAI, etc.), and maintenance of signals, models, and infrastructure. Operating with scale and speed, our world-class software and ML engineers are just getting started -- and as a core member of the founding team, you will have the opportunity to shape it!

Job Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, launch, and land code.
• End-to-end ownership of features from conception to launch.
• Coding, including but not limited to prototyping, live experimentation, iterating on search quality, leveraging and contributing to powerful technologies/infrastructure (e.g., NLP, ML), and maintenance of signals, models, and infrastructure.
• Collecting and analyzing the performance of features and platforms, including but not limited to reliability and latency, customer/ecosystem usage, experiments, and ML training data.
• Work with domain experts, UX, and PMs to translate organizational needs into technical decisions, with resource constraints in mind.
• Collaborate with researchers to continuously improve interfaces based on real-world user interactions and feedback.

About You

Required Qualifications (what you should have):

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 4 years of experience with software development in one or more programming languages, or 1 year of experience with an advanced degree.
• 4 years of experience with AI, data structures, or algorithms.
• Have hands-on experience in fine-tuning and deploying generative LLMs using TensorFlow and/or PyTorch frameworks (mandatory).
• Experience developing RAG models integrated with vector databases to power conversational AI products (mandatory).
• Excellent in-depth hands-on understanding of NLP, LLM, MLLM, Generative AI, and RAG workflows (mandatory).
• Experience with external and open-source tech stacks.

Preferred Experience (it would be awesome if you also had these):

• Masters or PhD Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
• 6+ years of experience in a software engineering role.
• Strong design and implementation skills and a drive to debug and resolve ambiguous issues.
• Drive for taking ownership of problems and building deep expertise in the problem space.
• Passion for quality and customer focus.
• Interest in GenAI, distributed systems, and infrastructure services.
• Comfort with ambiguity.
• Ability to collaborate cross-functionally.
• Willingness/excitement to work on new things outside of core role and comfort zone.
• Ability to design and implement new products/systems from the ground up.

Why AI71:

• Proven performance of our large language models.
• Strong traction and adoption from the open-source community.
• Secured proprietary data to build specialized distinctive models.
• Locked large computing power to support our roadmap.
• Signed anchor clients to develop POCs (proof of concept) and demonstrate our solutions.