Data Engineer – AI & LLM Projects

About the role

The Big Data Analytics Center (BIDAC) at UAE University is expanding its research team to develop and deploy scalable AI and NLP systems, focusing on large language model fine‑tuning and optimization for secure, domain‑specific applications.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines, ETL workflows, and databases supporting AI/ML projects.
• Develop and deploy LLMs and NLP pipelines for real‑world use cases in education, government, healthcare, etc.
• Conduct data preprocessing, cleaning, feature extraction, and model training for structured and unstructured data.
• Fine‑tune and optimize foundation models (GPT, LLaMA, Falcon, etc.) using domain‑specific datasets.
• Collaborate with research teams on model evaluation, interpretability, and explainability.
• Integrate AI models with front‑end applications, APIs, and databases for operational deployment.
• Support research publications, grant proposals, and technical documentation under BIDAC initiatives.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, Data Engineering or related field.
• Strong programming skills in Python and experience with data processing libraries (Pandas, NumPy, PySpark).
• Experience with machine‑learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch or Scikit‑Learn.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, statistical methods, and databases (SQL/NoSQL).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Preferred: Master’s degree, prior LLM fine‑tuning, knowledge‑graph or RAG pipeline experience, distributed computing (Spark, Dask, Ray), Arabic NLP.

Required skills

• Python
• Pandas, NumPy, PySpark
• TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit‑Learn
• SQL, NoSQL
• AWS, Azure, GCP
• Spark, Dask, Ray
• LangChain, Hugging Face Transformers, OpenAI/Anthropic/Cohere APIs
• Docker, FastAPI, Streamlit, MLflow
• DVC, Git