Senior Applied AI Engineer

Location: Abu Dhabi, UAE (Hybrid)
Company: ember Lifestyle - Luxury Travel & Experiential Design
Contract Duration: 6 months
Start Date: As soon as possible

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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 Type Script
• 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…