Forward Deployed AI Engineer - Technical Lead

About the role

Cognizant is hiring a Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Technical Lead, in Dubai. You set the technical direction for a squad embedded in the business and design, build, deploy and run agentic AI systems that solve real problems, end to end. This is a hands-on, build-first role with single-threaded ownership of one aviation outcome, working alongside a Business Product Owner and an AI Value Architect.

Key responsibilities

• Start every problem with the business need, work with stakeholders, and take solutions from discovery to production.
• Design and build enterprise-grade agentic AI applications for aviation scenarios, with agents that reason across steps, call tools and APIs, manage context and support human-in-the-loop.
• Design RAG pipelines over enterprise knowledge (ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, retrieval tuning, grounding).
• Build MCP-based integrations connecting agents to backend systems via REST/OpenAPI, webhooks and event-driven patterns, and expose work as reusable interfaces.
• Apply structured LLM patterns end to end: tool calling, schema-validated outputs, retries, fallbacks and guardrails.
• Own quality: testing, evaluation, observability, logging, versioning and feedback loops.
• Apply security, privacy, access control, auditability, responsible AI and governance across deployments.
• Set technical direction and standards, make build-vs-buy decisions, and coordinate with the Business Product Owner and AI Value Architect.
• Mentor engineers and help establish reusable patterns that grow Etihad's internal AI capability.

Required profile

• 8+ years building production-grade software, including 4+ years with GenAI, LLMs and applied ML, and at least 1 year of hands-on agentic AI.
• Fluent English and comfort in a culturally diverse, international team.
• Master's degree in CS, Software Engineering, Data Science, AI/ML or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Preferred: aviation domain knowledge, a background in classical machine learning and data science, and classical full-stack development.

Required skills

• Strong Python, plus strong knowledge of at least one of TypeScript/JavaScript, Java or C#.
• Modern engineering practice: async programming, FastAPI, Pydantic, Git, CI/CD, testing, error handling and logging.
• At least one agent framework or enterprise AI platform (e.g. LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenAI Agents SDK, Microsoft Foundry, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Google Vertex/Gemini).
• A vector database or search platform (e.g. Azure AI Search, pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, OpenSearch).
• Integrating enterprise systems and deploying on cloud with containers, monitoring and observability.