Director of Research & Development – Applied AI

About the role

Inception42 is seeking an accomplished Director of R&D in Applied AI to lead its applied research function. You will set technical direction across multiple flagship programs, including foundation language models and multi‑agent systems, while overseeing high‑stakes client delivery tracks that bring research outputs into production.

Key responsibilities

• Own the active applied research portfolio, define roadmap, allocate resources and conduct quarterly reviews.
• Direct foundation language model programs end‑to‑end, covering pre‑training, instruction tuning, alignment, evaluation and release.
• Oversee client delivery tracks, run regular progress reviews and re‑allocate resources as needed.
• Represent Inception R&D at CEO, group‑executive and Board forums and make impactful presentations.
• Manage strategic external partnerships with academic labs, frontier‑model labs, hyperscalers and safety teams.
• Lead a team of applied scientists through mentorship, performance management, hiring and talent strategy.

Required profile

• M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering or AI‑related field.
• Minimum 10 years of AI/ML experience, with at least 4 years in a technical leadership or director role.
• Proven ownership of a production foundation‑model release end‑to‑end.
• Strong publication record in major NLP/ML venues or equivalent product‑driven research/IP track.
• Experience deploying AI models at scale in regulated or government contexts, especially Arabic or low‑resource language NLP.

Required skills

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) and large language models.
• Applied machine learning and AI research.
• Arabic or other low‑resource language NLP at scale.
• Agentic‑AI architectures, planning, tool use and multi‑agent simulation.

What we offer

• Open, diverse and inclusive culture with a global vision.
• Outstanding learning, development and growth opportunities via structured training and high‑tech projects.
• Competitive remuneration package with healthcare, education support, leave benefits and more.