Senior Specialist - Production Engineer (Petroleum SME)

About the role

AIQ, an Abu Dhabi-based technology company developing industrial AI for the energy sector, is hiring a Senior Specialist - Production Engineer (Petroleum SME) in its Production Domain. The role covers artificial lift and autonomous well operations and reports to Christophe Van Laer. The engineer leads ESP, gas-lift and naturally flowing well workflows, 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, 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, choke response and network backpressure, evaluated 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, and 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, and specify reference measurements, uncertainty and alarm usefulness.
• Translate operating practices into decision logic for start-up, shutdown, recovery and optimisation, working with controls and OT specialists on operating envelopes, permissives, setpoints, fallback behaviour and operator override.
• Lead engineering validation from historical replay and simulation through advisory pilots to supervised closed-loop trials, and define acceptance criteria for degraded sensors, communications loss and unfamiliar conditions.
• Support field trials, investigate failures and measure production, energy and reliability outcomes, then turn lessons into reusable requirements, benchmark cases and operator guidance.

Required profile

• Degree in Petroleum Engineering or a related engineering degree, typically 12 or more years of relevant experience including recent hands-on work with producing wells.
• Deep ESP engineering expertise 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.
• Professional English communication and the ability to write requirements that engineers and developers can implement.

Required skills

• Nodal analysis, multiphase flow, inflow and outflow relationships, and the interaction between reservoir deliverability and artificial lift.
• Well and lift engineering tools such as PROSPER, PIPESIM or DesignRite, and work with historian or SCADA data, well tests and equipment records.
• Defining safe operating envelopes and taking part in operational change reviews.