رئيس الذكاء الاصطناعي التطبيقي (Head of Applied AI)

Job Summary

The Head of Applied AI at Echelon leads the applied AI engineering team, overseeing technology, technical quality, and customer engagements to deliver AI solutions aligned with critical workflows.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for engagements, including architecture, model selection, partnerships, and build versus buy decisions.
• Recruit and manage engineers and team leads, design team structures based on demand, and cultivate an engineering culture and talent pipeline in the region.
• Ensure technical quality from prototype to production, approve scope and architecture, and manage technical risks before customer commitments.
• Support sales by acting as the senior technical contact in strategic pursuits, including architecture, security, demos, and solution design with customer CIOs and CISOs.
• Establish standards for building, securing, and operating AI systems compliant with data protection and security regulations, and enforce these with delivery partners.
• Ensure capability transfer to customers through documentation, evaluations, monitoring, training, and clean handovers.
• Collaborate with the platform lead to influence the platform roadmap based on delivery patterns and customer feedback.
• Lead technical relationships with technology partners and model providers across engagements.

Requirements

• 6+ years in engineering with leadership experience in AI companies, forward deployed businesses, or as a technical founder.
• Experience taking a product or platform from inception to scaled real users.
• Hands-on expertise with LLMs, agent frameworks, MCP, retrieval, evaluation, and making AI systems observable, safe, and reliable at scale.
• Knowledge of distributed systems, data engineering, and cloud/on-premise infrastructure under strict data residency and security constraints.
• Experience leading complex enterprise or government deployments, including technical pre-sales and scoping.
• Ability to communicate effectively with both engineers and executive stakeholders.
• PhD in AI, Machine Learning, or Computer Science is a strong advantage.
• Experience delivering in Saudi Arabia or the GCC, especially in public sector or regulated industries, with knowledge of PDPL, NCA, and SDAIA frameworks is preferred.
• Experience building Arabic NLP, speech, or multimodal systems; Arabic language skills are a plus.
• Experience with fine-tuning, post-training, or serving open-weight models on private or on-premise infrastructure.
• Experience managing technical relationships with model providers, cloud providers, or technology partners.

What the company offers

• Base salary, performance bonus, medical coverage, and equity through the employee equity programme.
• Regular travel to customer sites across the region and partners abroad.
• Location options include London with regular time in Riyadh, or Riyadh.

We refresh listings regularly, but some roles close early on the source platform.