Senior AI Engineer - LLMs, VLMs and Agentic Systems

About the role

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a publicly funded research institute based in Abu Dhabi, UAE, is looking for a Senior AI Engineer within its Robotics Research Center. The role suits someone with a strong foundation in both research and engineering who has hands-on experience developing, fine-tuning and deploying advanced AI systems, and who wants to build scalable, production-ready AI applications with multimodal reasoning and autonomous intelligent agents.

Key responsibilities

• Design, train, fine-tune and optimize LLMs and VLMs for real-world use.
• Develop and orchestrate autonomous agent frameworks capable of multi-step reasoning, planning and tool use.
• Build scalable, low-latency inference systems for large models using frameworks such as DeepSpeed, vLLM, TensorRT or ONNX Runtime, and implement distributed training, model parallelism and efficient inference pipelines.
• Optimize deployment for edge devices, GPUs and cloud-based platforms.
• Stay up to date with advances in LLMs, multimodal models and autonomous agents.

Required profile

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, AI/ML, Robotics or a related field.
• Proven hands-on work with LLMs, VLMs or agentic frameworks.
• Experience producing AI systems at scale.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Nice to have: reinforcement learning, robotics, simulation or embodied AI background, and publications in AI conferences.

Required skills

• PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, OpenAI APIs, DeepSpeed, vLLM, CUDA and GPU optimization.
• C++ for performance-critical components.
• Docker, vector databases (Weaviate, Pinecone, FAISS, Milvus), Redis, Kafka, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Evaluation tools such as Weights & Biases, MLflow, TensorBoard and eval frameworks.
• Knowledge of transformers, LoRA/QLoRA, quantization, RLHF/RLAIF and agentic frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGPT and CrewAI.