Senior Applied AI Engineer
About ember
ember is a luxury experiential studio shaping the future of travel, lifestyle and guest experience. We are the Middle East's first luxury experiential brand, endorsed by Forbes Travel Guide. From transformative journeys for ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families to high-impact experiences for governments and global corporations. We design journeys, worlds and moments people remember forever.
We create stories that you'll tell forever.
The Opportunity
Every exceptional ember journey is built on a depth of knowledge: client preferences, relationships, supplier insight, past decisions and the details that make an experience feel personal. Much of that knowledge currently lives across people, platforms and documents.
As Senior Applied AI Engineer, you will lead the technical direction of a full-stack operating platform that brings together applications, data, integrations, workflows and an intelligence layer at its core. You will own the architecture and technical roadmap, guiding the platform from concept through production while ensuring it remains secure, reliable and useful to the people who depend on it. This is a rare opportunity to shape a genuinely useful software product from the ground up.
What You'll Do
Product & Platform Architecture
Design and build the full-stack software platform that will support ember's operating environment: user-facing applications, backend services, data foundations, integrations and the workflows that connect them. Create a coherent platform rather than a collection of disconnected tools.
Institutional Intelligence
Build the intelligence layer within that platform, bringing together client, supplier, journey and operational knowledge. Create systems that make important context searchable, structured and useful to the people delivering ember's work.
Evidence-Backed AI
Build retrieval, RAG and knowledge workflows that provide traceable, source-backed answers. Establish practical evaluation, observability and safeguards so AI outputs are useful, reliable and appropriately governed.
Data, Integrations & Services
Lead the technical design of data ingestion pipelines and integrations across internal systems, APIs, documents and communications. Build secure backend services and reusable interfaces that support internal tools today and future product surfaces.
Applied Workflows
Develop AI-assisted workflows for client intelligence, journey planning, supplier discovery, proposal and dossier generation, sourcing and operational monitoring. Keep human authority in place wherever judgement, commercial decisions or client sensitivity matter.
Technical Leadership
Own the overall platform architecture and technical roadmap. Make final decisions on core technology, infrastructure, security patterns and AI models; set engineering standards, evaluation methods and AI safeguards; and lead delivery from concept through production. Mentor and review the work of the Applied AI Engineer and AI Product Development Intern, and communicate technical decisions, trade-offs and risks directly to ember's leadership and technology partners.
Who You Are
You are a hands-on engineer who enjoys taking ambitious, loosely defined ideas and making them real. You care about elegant architecture, but you are equally motivated by whether a system is useful to the people relying on it every day.
You are comfortable moving between product conversations, data models, backend services and AI workflows. You communicate clearly with non-technical colleagues and know when to simplify, when to challenge, and when to make a decision.
You take privacy, permissions and trust seriously. You understand that in a high-touch business, the quality of the system matters as much as its capability.
What You'll Need
Essential:
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including production AI-powered applications and at least two years of hands-on experience building LLM, retrieval or AI workflow systems in production
- Strong experience with LLM applications, RAG, semantic retrieval and structured data retrieval
- Strong full-stack engineering skills, including user-facing applications and backend services in Python and/or TypeScript
- Experience with APIs, integrations, data modelling and cloud deployment
- Practical understanding of authentication, permissions, logging and secure data handling
- Ability to own technical decisions and explain trade-offs clearly
Preferred:
- Experience working in travel, hospitality, luxury lifestyle, concierge, CRM or travel-technology environments
- Knowledge graphs, entity and relationship modelling, or enterprise search
- Document intelligence, extraction pipelines, evaluation or AI observability
- Experience building internal operating platforms, vertical SaaS or travel technology
The Details
Location: Abu Dhabi (Hybrid)
Contract Type: Full-time, fixed-term contract
Contract Duration: 6 months
Candidate Eligibility: Open to candidates currently based outside the UAE. The role is based in Abu Dhabi (hybrid); relocation and visa arrangements, where applicable, will be discussed with shortlisted candidates.
Start Date: As soon as possible
How to Apply
Please send your CV and a brief note to jobs@ember.ae with the subject line: Senior Applied AI Engineer — Your Name.
In your note, tell us about an AI system you have taken from an early concept into production, and the judgement calls that made it trustworthy and useful.
Interview Process: Shortlisted candidates will complete an initial interview followed by a practical technical discussion based on previous work. We do not require speculative unpaid project work.
Please submit your application through the designated application channel only. Applications sent via WhatsApp or phone will not be considered.