Director - Research and Development (Applied AI)

About the role

Inception, a G42 company, is looking for an accomplished Director of R&D in Applied AI to lead its applied AI research function in Abu Dhabi. The role sets the technical direction across multiple flagship programs in parallel, including a foundation language model family and multi-agent and agentic systems research, while overseeing client delivery tracks that turn research outputs into production. It is a full-time position.

Key responsibilities

• Own the active R&D portfolio end-to-end: research roadmap, milestones, resource allocation and quarterly reviews.
• Direct the foundation language model program, from pre-training and instruction tuning and alignment to evaluation and release.
• Oversee high-stakes client and delivery tracks and hold regular reviews with the R&D team on progress, blockers and re-allocation.
• Represent Inception R&D at CEO, group-executive and Board level, making impactful presentations.
• Lead strategic partnerships with academic research partners, frontier-model labs, hyperscaler partners, safety teams and evaluation and red-teaming vendors.
• Lead a team of applied scientists and senior applied scientists, including hiring, mentorship and talent strategy.
• Set and enforce R&D quality standards across projects and teams.

Required profile

• M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering or an AI-related field; specialization in NLP, large language models or applied ML is highly desirable.
• Minimum 10 years of experience in AI / ML, with at least 4 years in a technical leadership or director role directing multiple concurrent research programs.
• Demonstrated ownership of at least one production foundation-model release end-to-end.
• Strong publication record in major NLP / ML venues, or an equivalent product-driven research and IP-filing track record.
• Production experience with Arabic or other lower-resource-language NLP at scale.
• Experience deploying AI models in regulated or government contexts, including content moderation and policy-aligned guardrails.

Required skills

• Familiarity with agentic-AI architectures: planning, tool use and multi-agent simulation.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.