Contango

AI Engineer (6 months contract)

Contango  •  Abu Dhabi, AE (Onsite)  •  1 hour ago
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Job Description

Contract duration: 6 months (with a potential extension)
Engagement Type: Full-time
Start date: July 2026
Location: Abu Dhabi (on-site)

We are seeking an experienced AI Engineer to design, build, and deploy production-grade AI systems — primarily LLM-powered applications, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows — that solve real client business problems in the UAE. The role combines applied AI expertise with solid software and data engineering foundations, with hands-on ownership from prototype to production and hypercare.

Key Responsibilities

  • Design and deliver end-to-end LLM applications: scope the use case, build, evaluate, deploy, and hand over reliable, observable services.

  • Build and optimize RAG pipelines: data parsing, ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, re-ranking, and context-window optimization.

  • Design and orchestrate agentic workflows for reasoning, planning, and task execution.

  • Build evaluation and observability: define metrics (accuracy, latency, cost-per-task), run eval pipelines, and monitor systems in production.

  • Integrate AI components into client applications via secure backend APIs; collaborate with data, software, and DevSecOps teams.

  • Engineer the supporting data layer: pipelines, feature/embedding stores, and data quality for AI workloads on cloud platforms.

  • Manage the full lifecycle: deployment, monitoring, versioning, rollback readiness, and cost/performance optimization.

  • Translate business problems into AI solutions and communicate model capabilities, limitations, and trade-offs clearly to clients and stakeholders.

  • Maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and delivery artifacts across Design & Align → Build → UAT → Production & Hypercare.


Candidate Requirements

  • Demonstrated experience delivering AI solutions in an enterprise or client-facing/consulting environment.

  • Prior experience at management consulting firms and/or Big Tech is an advantage.

  • Strong Python and solid software engineering fundamentals.

  • Hands-on LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI), including tokenization, latency, and cost control.

  • Proven RAG architecture experience with vector databases (e.g., Azure AI Search, Qdrant, Chroma, Pinecone, FAISS).

  • Experience with agent/orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI).

  • Evaluation and observability skills for production AI (eval pipelines, LLM-as-judge, monitoring).

  • Working knowledge of a major cloud AI/data stack (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and MLOps tooling (e.g., MLflow, Docker).

  • Solid data engineering skills: SQL, distributed processing (e.g., Spark/Databricks).

  • Strong collaboration and communication skills — able to work with both technical teams and senior client stakeholders.


Qualifications

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field.

  • 3–6 years of experience building and shipping AI/ML solutions into production.

  • Preferred certifications (nice to have): cloud AI certifications (Azure AI Engineer, AWS ML, Databricks GenAI Engineer).

Contango

About Contango

Contango is a strategic partner for transformative growth and sustained success in the dynamic Abu Dhabi market. As a trusted advisor to ADQ's portfolio companies, Contango empowers CEOs to drive strategic growth initiatives, navigate disruptive forces, and maximize long-term value creation.

The locally based team of industry experts excels in providing comprehensive growth solutions that combine global best practices with deep local market expertise. Contango focuses on long-term value creation, empowering clients to achieve the full scale of their aspirations.

With a demonstrated track record in enterprise transformations and performance improvements across companies in Abu Dhabi, Contango brings a wealth of expertise across a range of industries. The company harnesses its proven track record and cross-sector knowledge to develop custom solutions that drive competitive advantage.

Contango is committed to aligning strategic initiatives with Abu Dhabi's vision for achieving economic diversification and strengthening its global competitiveness.

Industry
Consulting & Advisory
Company Size
201-500 employees
Headquarters
Abu Dhabi, AE
Year Founded
Unknown
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