LLM / GenAI Engineer
Engineers building production LLM and GenAI systems — fine-tuning, retrieval, agentic workflows, evaluation — at the model layer.
GenAI engineering is now a discipline of its own. The mandates we see split between two patterns: engineers fine-tuning and post-training open-weight models for domain use cases (legal, financial, Arabic), and engineers building the retrieval, evaluation, and orchestration layers around those models.
Most clients want both. A strong GenAI engineer in the GCC owns the full path from base model to deployed system — including the parts that look more like classical ML engineering than they look like "prompt engineering".
What you'll typically own
- Fine-tune and post-train LLMs (SFT, DPO, RLHF-adjacent methods) on domain and Arabic-language corpora.
- Build retrieval-augmented generation pipelines — chunking, embedding, vector stores, hybrid retrieval.
- Design evaluation harnesses that catch regression beyond static benchmarks — task-specific evals, golden sets, human-in-loop.
- Optimise inference — quantisation, KV-cache strategies, serving on sovereign GPU infrastructure.
- Design and ship agentic workflows where reliability matters — tool use, planning, structured output.
Profile fit
Must have
- 5+ years engineering, with at least 2 building production LLM systems beyond the API layer.
- Hands-on with at least one of: SFT, DPO, continued pre-training on open-weight models.
- Production-grade RAG experience — not toy examples.
- Comfortable with the inference stack — vLLM, TGI, SGLang, or equivalent.
- Engineering-first thinking. You ship to users, not to notebooks.
Nice to have
- Arabic language capability or work on multilingual / low-resource LLMs.
- Experience with reasoning models, structured generation, or constrained decoding.
- Contributions to open-source LLM tooling (LangChain, LlamaIndex, vLLM, etc).
- Background in a regulated domain (finance, healthcare, government).
Indicative package
Total fixed monthly base, tax-free. Sovereign LLM programmes (TII, HUMAIN, Inception) typically come in 10–15% above market for this band.
| UAE · AED · per month | KSA · SAR · per month | |
|---|---|---|
| Mid–Senior (5–8 yrs) | AED35,000–48,000/mo | SAR32,000–42,000/mo |
| Senior (8–12 yrs) | AED45,000–60,000/mo | SAR42,000–52,000/mo |
| Bonus typical | AED15–25% | SAR15–25% |
USD equivalent: approximately $115,000–$196,000 per year before bonus.
Location & corridor
KSA
Riyadh (HUMAIN, SDAIA-adjacent, KAUST commercial spin-outs). On-site weighting is high.
UAE
Abu Dhabi (TII, G42 portfolio, Inception) and Dubai (commercial GenAI). Hybrid more accessible than KSA.
Visa & relocation
Full sponsorship is standard. Family visa, schooling allowance and health cover are included for senior bands. Most clients fund relocation including flights, 30–60 days temporary accommodation, and shipping.
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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