Director - Research and Development (Applied AI)

Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Company

Inception, a hirify.global company, develops AI-powered domain-specific and industry-agnostic products for practical deployment across industries, infrastructure, and national-level initiatives.

What you will do

• Own the applied R&D portfolio, including the research roadmap, milestones, resource allocation, and quarterly reviews.
• Direct foundation language model programmes across pre-training, post-training, alignment, evaluation, safety, and release.
• Lead multi-agent and agentic-AI research programmes and oversee the productization of research outputs through client delivery tracks.
• Represent R&D in CEO, executive, and Board-level forums and make release, IP, and prioritization decisions.
• Manage strategic partnerships with academic institutions, frontier-model labs, hyperscalers, safety teams, and evaluation vendors.
• Lead applied scientists through technical mentorship, hiring, performance development, and team strategy.

Requirements

• M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, or an AI-related field.
• At least 10 years of AI/ML experience, including 4 years in technical leadership or director-level roles managing multiple research programmes.
• End-to-end ownership of at least one production foundation-model release.
• Strong publication record in major NLP/ML venues or an equivalent product-driven research and IP-filing record.
• Production experience with Arabic or other low-resource-language NLP at scale.
• Experience deploying AI models in regulated or government contexts, including content moderation and policy-aligned guardrails, plus familiarity with planning, tool use, and multi-agent simulation.

Nice to have

• Specialization in NLP, large language models, or applied machine learning.

Culture & Benefits

• Open, diverse, and inclusive environment with a global vision.
• Structured training, learning, development, and growth opportunities.
• Work on high-tech projects and industry-first AI innovations.
• Competitive remuneration package with healthcare, education support, leave benefits, and other perks.