Senior Applied AI Engineer

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

Desired Candidate Profile

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