AI Engineer

Client of Durlston Partners

AI Engineer Prop Trading UAE Up to $250,000 USD total Opportunities to do genuinely frontier AI research at a prop trading firm in the UAE are rare. Most firms with real research ambition keep their ML teams in New York, London, or Singapore. This is one of the few exceptions, and the pedigree behind it is exceptional. The UAE is a central part of their future. The office is growing quickly and is already home to senior AI researchers, quant leads, and strategy leadership. The team is small by design with a clear and funded plan to scale significantly. The people joining now will shape the culture, the tooling, and the direction of the research programme. Alongside this, the firm has secured compute resources allowing them to do large-scale foundational model work. Why you d want this role A rare opportunity to do frontier AI research within a live trading business, where your models feed real systems Flat structure with direct exposure to senior leadership from day one Access to serious compute infrastructure Work across the full model lifecycle training, evaluation, in-depth analysis, and innovation A team assembled from some of the best minds in HFT and AI globally Why Abu Dhabi Consistently ranked among the safest and most liveable cities in the world One of the fastest-growing hubs for buy-side finance and AI in the region Significant tax advantages over London, New York, or Singapore The most sought-after neighbourhoods are a 10 20 minute drive from the office no packed commutes, no tube strikes, and a cab is around £8 each way Year-round sunshine and world-class infrastructure What you ll be doing Designing and building frameworks that underpin the firm s next-generation ML platforms and trading systems Ensuring compatibility with modern cloud infrastructure, leading ML libraries, and state-of-the-art model architectures Running large-scale training experiments and contributing to rigorous, in-depth model evaluation and analysis Working closely with researchers and engineers across multiple offices on foundational model research spanning language, vision, multimodal, and structured data