Senior Specialist - Production Engineer (Petroleum SME)

About the role

AIQ, an Abu Dhabi technology company developing industrial AI for the energy sector, is building software and AI products for well surveillance, artificial-lift optimisation and autonomous production. This Senior Specialist - Production Engineer role sits in the AIQ Production Domain and reports to Christophe Van Laer. The engineer leads the workflow for electric submersible pump (ESP), gas-lift and naturally flowing wells, working with software engineers, AI scientists and controls specialists to move from diagnosis and recommendations to validated closed-loop operation.

Key responsibilities

• Define surveillance and optimisation workflows for ESP wells, including pump selection, operating range, intake conditions, free gas, motor loading, temperature, vibration, variable-speed drive settings and failure diagnosis.
• Develop gas-lift and naturally flowing well workflows covering injection performance, valve behaviour, unloading, instability, choke response and network backpressure, evaluating well settings within shared gas-supply and facility constraints.
• Build, calibrate and challenge well-performance models using nodal analysis, inflow and outflow relationships, fluid properties and equipment data; partner with the PTA SME to separate reservoir or skin changes from lift, wellbore and measurement effects.
• Define engineering requirements for virtual flow metering, sensor validation, anomaly detection and equipment-health models, specifying reference measurements, uncertainty, alarm usefulness and review conditions.
• Translate operating practices into decision logic for start-up, shutdown, recovery and optimisation, working with controls and OT specialists on operating envelopes, permissives, setpoints, ramp limits, fallback behaviour and operator override.
• Lead engineering validation from historical replay and simulation through advisory pilots to supervised closed-loop trials, define acceptance criteria and support field trials, failure investigation and customer adoption.

Required profile

• Degree in Petroleum Engineering or a related engineering degree, typically 12+ years of relevant experience including recent hands-on work with producing wells.
• Deep ESP expertise (selection, diagnosis, optimisation, troubleshooting) and substantive gas-lift operating or optimisation experience, able to diagnose performance beyond a single vendor.
• Experience delivering digital well surveillance, remote optimisation or automation workflows into routine field use, and validating solutions with software, analytics or controls teams.
• Practical understanding of Pressure Transient Analysis (PTA) results and their limitations, with specialist interpretation owned by the PTA SME.
• Professional English communication and the ability to write requirements engineers and developers can implement.
• Preferred: supervised closed-loop deployments, advanced process control, model predictive control, edge applications, physics-based or hybrid AI models, virtual flow metering, equipment reliability analysis, automated diagnostics, Python/SQL, offshore and Middle East operations, intelligent completions or downhole gas-lift valves.

Required skills

• Well-performance and nodal analysis, including fluid properties, multiphase flow, inflow and outflow relationships and reservoir deliverability.
• Hands-on use of PROSPER, PIPESIM, DesignRite or equivalent well and lift engineering tools.
• Ability to work with historian or SCADA data, well tests, equipment records and operating-event histories.
• Experience defining safe operating envelopes and participating in operational change reviews.