Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Hi,#Xebia is looking for Forward Deployed AI EngineerLocation- Abu DhabiExp- 4+ yearsPurposeXebia is building in-house AI expertise to deliver AI in aviation. We build, we do not buy off the shelf. As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer you are the core of a Squad, you sit with stakeholders to understand the problem and the why, then design, build, deploy and run the agentic AI systems that solve it, end to end. This is a hands-on, build-first role with single-threaded ownership of a real aviation outcome, working alongside a Business Product Owner and an AI Value Architect, on a shared platform (paved road, MCP fabric, standards) that lets your squad self-serve against systems. Accountabilities & Responsibilities:Understand before you build. Start every problem with the business need and the why, working directly with stakeholders, then take the solution from discovery to production.Design, build, deploy and continuously improve enterprise-grade agentic AI applications for real aviation scenarios, using agentic coding as your default way of working.Build agents that reason across steps, call tools and APIs, manage context, handle exceptions and support human-in-the-loop, reliably and at enterprise scale.Design and implement RAG pipelines over enterprise knowledge: ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, retrieval tuning, grounding and source traceability.Build MCP-based integrations and connect agents to backend systems via REST/OpenAPI, webhooks and event-driven patterns with secure authentication, and expose your own work as clean, reusable, self-serviceable interfaces.Apply structured LLM patterns end to end: tool calling, schema-validated outputs, retries, fallbacks and guardrails.Own quality from day one: testing, evaluation, observability, logging, versioning and feedback loops for reliability, accuracy, latency, security and cost.Apply security, privacy, access control, auditability, responsible-AI and governance across every deployment.Take single-threaded ownership of a domain outcome (one owner, one result), and help establish reusable patterns that grow internal AI capability rather than renting it.Coordinate with your Business Product Owner, AI Value Architect and other squads; speak up when AI is not the right tool.Education & Experience:We look for a hands-on Core-level engineer who combines a business-first mindset with real agentic-AI engineering depth:Curiosity above all: you dig into problems, question assumptions and want to understand how the airline actually works.A business-first, human-centric mindset: aviation is made for humans, by humans, and AI supports people, it does not replace them. Fluent English, comfortable in a culturally diverse, international team.Around 3 years building production-grade software with GenAI and LLMs, including about 1 year of hands-on agentic AI: applications that go beyond prompting or basic chatbots, with tool calling, workflow orchestration, RAG, context management, evaluation and monitoring.Hands-on experience or strong working knowledge of MCP for connecting agents to tools, systems, APIs and data.Strong Python, with basic knowledge of at least one of TypeScript / JavaScript, and modern engineering practice: async programming, FastAPI, Pydantic, Git and CI/CD, testing, error handling and logging.Practical experience with 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) and with a vector database or search platform (e.g. Azure AI Search, pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, OpenSearch).Experience integrating enterprise systems (APIs, managed identities, webhooks, queues, middleware) and deploying on cloud with containers.Strong assets: aviation or airline domain knowledge; a background in classical machine learning and data science; and classical full-stack development (interfaces, frontends, APIs, backend engineering).Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, AI/ML or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience; relevant cloud-AI, GenAI, agentic-AI or MLOps certifications are an advantage.Growth path: grow into Senior Forward Deployed AI Engineer and Technical Lead, and onward to AI Value Architect, owning a cluster’s value journey while still building.