Head of Engineering

The Head of Engineering at MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) oversees the technical architecture, deployment, and operational integrity of large-scale AI systems.

This role bridges cutting-edge research and enterprise-grade infrastructure — leading engineering excellence across product development, cloud and on-premise operations, and AI model integration.

The ideal candidate combines deep engineering expertise with a comprehensive understanding of the AI model ecosystem, including large language models (LLMs), multimodal systems, infrastructure orchestration, and model safety.

• Product Engineering & System Architecture
• Lead the end-to-end development and operation of IFM's AI product platforms.
• Design and maintain scalable, secure, and high-availability architectures across hybrid cloud and on-premise environments.
• Implement modern DevOps pipelines (Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, GitHub Actions) for reliable model deployment and service uptime.
• Oversee API design, data flow, and backend system integration to support model training, inference, and analytics.

• AI Model Integration & Infrastructure
• Collaborate with AI research teams to productionize foundation models (LLMs, multimodal, reasoning, and domain-specialized models).
• Manage large-scale GPU clusters and distributed inference environments using tools such as vLLM, Ray, DeepSpeed, and Triton Inference Server.
• Oversee model deployment pipelines, ensuring efficient scaling and resource optimization across AWS, on-prem, and co-location data centers.
• Support ongoing experimentation, model fine-tuning, and benchmark validation in collaboration with global research teams.

• Product Testing & Security Assurance
• Establish and lead model red teaming, adversarial testing, and guardrail evaluation workflows to ensure AI model robustness.
• Design and oversee safety assurance pipelines — stress-testing models against prompt injection, jailbreaking, data leakage, and bias exploits.
• Collaborate with AI safety researchers to integrate content filters, alignment layers, and policy enforcement systems into production stacks.
• Implement automated regression tests, monitoring dashboards, and security incident protocols to maintain responsible AI standards.
• Ensure compliance with MBZUAI's AI ethics and governance frameworks, aligning with international safety guidelines.

• Cloud and Data Center Management
• Manage hybrid compute infrastructure combining AWS cloud, on-prem GPU clusters, and co-location data centers.
• Optimize resource allocation across compute, storage, and network layers.
• Oversee security, IAM policies, and network zoning, maintaining full data sovereignty and operational resilience.
• Ensure system observability through centralized logging, metrics, and alerting frameworks (e.g., CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus).

• Data Engineering & Pipeline Operations
• Supervise the design and optimization of data ingestion and retrieval pipelines supporting AI training and evaluation.
• Ensure data versioning, integrity, and accessibility across structured and unstructured data formats.
• Support compliance with internal and external data governance policies.

• Team Leadership & Strategic Reporting
• Lead, mentor, and scale a multidisciplinary engineering team across product, infrastructure, and operations domains.
• Translate leadership priorities into actionable technical roadmaps and deliverables.
• Coordinate execution of strategic projects and institutional initiatives, ensuring alignment with IFM's mission and MBZUAI's strategic objectives.
• Provide regular progress and performance reports to MBZUAI leadership and key stakeholders, highlighting milestones, risks, and innovation outcomes.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement across distributed teams (Abu Dhabi, Paris, US, etc.).

• Education: Bachelor's or master's in computer science, Engineering, or a related discipline (PhD preferred).
• Experience: 8–12 years in software engineering, infrastructure management, or AI systems; at least years in a leadership capacity.
• Proven expertise in:
• Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, and system observability tools.
• AWS Cloud Management: EKS, EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, CloudWatch, Route 53.
• On-prem & Co-location Data Center Operations: GPU cluster orchestration, network configuration, and storage optimization.
• AI Ecosystem & LLMs: hands-on familiarity with open-source and commercial models (Llama, Qwen, Jais, Mistral, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.).
• MLOps & Model Serving: vLLM, Triton, MLflow, Ray, or Hugging Face Transformers.
• AI Security & Red Teaming: prompt defense, guardrail systems, toxicity and bias detection, model evaluation frameworks.
• Strong foundation in Python, Bash, and system-level automation.
• Demonstrated success in managing complex technical programs and delivering strategic outcomes.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and leadership skills.

• The Head of Engineering ensures that MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models operates at world-class standards in scalability, safety, and performance. By uniting infrastructure excellence, AI safety, and strategic alignment, this role secures IFM's position as a global leader in sovereign, responsible, and robust AI infrastructure for the UAE and beyond.