Arabic NLP Researcher
Researchers contributing to Arabic-language LLM development — pre-training, post-training, evaluation — inside sovereign programmes.
The smallest pool by volume, the highest depth bar by a clear margin. Most mandates in this band come from the four programmes seriously investing in Arabic LLM research — TII (Falcon Arabic, Jais-adjacent), HUMAIN, G42 Inception, and the AI organisations inside the major regional universities.
Research roles in this family expect contribution-level familiarity with recent literature, Arabic language capability or dialectal exposure, and direct experience with model training or post-training pipelines.
What you'll typically own
- Contribute to pre-training, continued pre-training, and post-training of Arabic LLMs.
- Design and run evaluation suites that measure model behaviour on Arabic-specific tasks — including dialectal coverage.
- Curate, clean, and augment Arabic corpora — including dialect-tagged data.
- Publish at top-tier venues (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS) where the role supports it.
- Partner with engineering teams to translate research into deployable model artifacts.
Profile fit
Must have
- PhD in NLP, ML, or a closely related field — or equivalent research output.
- Hands-on experience with LLM training or post-training, not just fine-tuning.
- Arabic language capability — reading fluency at minimum, native or near-native preferred.
- Publication record at ACL / EMNLP / NAACL / NeurIPS or equivalent.
- Comfort with the deep-learning research stack — PyTorch, distributed training, large-scale evaluation.
Nice to have
- Experience with Arabic dialect modelling specifically — Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, Maghrebi.
- Prior contribution to released open-weight Arabic models.
- Background in linguistics or computational linguistics.
- Existing network within the Arabic NLP research community.
Indicative package
Total fixed monthly base, tax-free. Publication bonuses, conference travel and dedicated research compute are typically included on top.
| UAE · AED · per month | KSA · SAR · per month | |
|---|---|---|
| Researcher (post-PhD–5 yrs) | AED40,000–55,000/mo | SAR35,000–48,000/mo |
| Senior Researcher (5+ yrs) | AED55,000–75,000/mo | SAR48,000–62,000/mo |
| Bonus typical | AED20–30% | SAR20–30% |
USD equivalent: approximately $115,000–$245,000 per year before bonus.
Location & corridor
KSA
Riyadh (HUMAIN, KAUST commercial spin-outs, SDAIA-adjacent). On-site 5 days.
UAE
Abu Dhabi (TII, Inception, MBZUAI-adjacent). Hybrid is sometimes available for senior researchers.
Visa & relocation
Full sponsorship is standard. Research visas, family visa, schooling allowance and health cover are typically included. Conference travel budget and publication / sabbatical provisions are commonly negotiated.
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