Arabic NLP Engineer
Engineers operationalising Arabic LLM research — training, evaluation, serving — at the production layer.
Arabic NLP Engineering is the production-side counterpart to the research band. These engineers take Arabic LLMs and the pipelines around them — pre-training, fine-tuning, evaluation, serving — from research artifact to deployed system.
Most mandates sit inside the same four programmes as the research band, plus the commercial AI organisations building Arabic-first products (legal AI, customer service automation, government services).
What you'll typically own
- Implement and maintain the engineering pipelines that train, post-train, and evaluate Arabic LLMs.
- Build retrieval, tokenisation, and serving infrastructure tuned for Arabic-specific characteristics.
- Operate distributed training jobs at scale on sovereign or on-prem GPU clusters.
- Build evaluation harnesses that measure dialectal coverage, factuality, and instruction following in Arabic.
- Partner with researchers on the engineering side of pre-training and post-training experiments.
Profile fit
Must have
- 5+ years production engineering with at least 2 on NLP / LLM systems.
- Hands-on with at least one Arabic NLP project — tokenisation, retrieval, fine-tuning, or evaluation.
- Distributed training experience — Megatron, DeepSpeed, FSDP, or equivalent.
- Strong on the LLM inference stack and Arabic-specific optimisations.
- Reading-level Arabic preferred; willingness to develop language capability is acceptable.
Nice to have
- Native or near-native Arabic.
- Prior contribution to open-weight Arabic models or Arabic NLP open-source.
- Experience with multilingual or low-resource LLM training.
- Sector knowledge in legal, government, or financial Arabic-language use cases.
Indicative package
Total fixed monthly base, tax-free. Sovereign LLM programmes typically come in 10–15% above market for this band.
| UAE · AED · per month | KSA · SAR · per month | |
|---|---|---|
| Mid–Senior (5–8 yrs) | AED40,000–52,000/mo | SAR35,000–46,000/mo |
| Senior (8–12 yrs) | AED50,000–60,000/mo | SAR46,000–54,000/mo |
| Bonus typical | AED20–30% | SAR20–30% |
USD equivalent: approximately $115,000–$196,000 per year before bonus.
Location & corridor
KSA
Riyadh (HUMAIN, KAUST spin-outs, SDAIA-adjacent). On-site weighting is high.
UAE
Abu Dhabi (TII, Inception, G42 portfolio). Hybrid more accessible than KSA.
Visa & relocation
Full sponsorship is standard. Family visa, schooling allowance and health cover are typically included.
Get on our radar for this role.
Registering takes 3 minutes. We screen against active mandates and only come back when there's a credible fit. This is a talent pool registration — it pre-positions you for matching client briefs as they come up.
Want the market context for this band? Read the GCC market intelligence brief.
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