Head of AI Platform (Consulting experience must)

Location: Abu DhabiDuration: Yearly renewable contractCore ResponsibilitiesPlatform Ownership & StrategyLeadership & OrganisationDelivery & Operations at ScaleTechnical LeadershipStakeholder & Cross-functionalBasic Qualifications12+ years of software engineering experience, with 6+ years in engineering leadership, including meaningful time leading a platform or infrastructure organisation.Experience building and operating a platform that serves multiple downstream teams or business lines — with evidence that adoption was earned through the platform’s quality, not mandated by policy.Deep grounding in cloud infrastructure and platform engineering: containers and orchestration, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, API and gateway design, multi-tenant isolation, and identity and access management.Proven production ownership at scale: SLOs, incident management, capacity planning, and cost management for systems that other teams depend on.Experience setting technical direction at a level that crosses team boundaries: architecture reviews, platform decisions, and standards that apply across an engineering organisation.Experience hiring senior technical talent: calibrating bars, designing assessments, and personally closing engineers in a competitive market.Strong written and verbal communication — you can represent a platform organisation clearly to executive stakeholders, translate strategy into programme direction without losing nuance, and hold your own in technical forumsPreferred QualificationsDirect experience building or scaling an AI/ML platform: model serving and inference infrastructure, GPU capacity management, retrieval architectures, agent frameworks and orchestration, and evaluation and LLM observability tooling.Deep familiarity with the challenges of operating AI systems in production — evaluation, non-determinism, model behaviour over time, and the operational discipline that AI systems demand.Experience delivering platforms or mission-critical software in a government, public sector, defence, financial services, or other highly regulated environment — including the data residency, sovereignty, compliance, and procurement realities that come with it.Experience running a platform-as-a-product function: developer experience metrics, internal customer research, and a roadmap driven by the needs of the teams who build on the platform.Strong working knowledge of the current AI technology landscape — frontier and openweight models, orchestration frameworks, inference and serving infrastructure, evaluation methodology — sufficient to shape direction, challenge assumptions, and make credible build/buy/partner calls.Experience operating in multi-stakeholder environments where outcomes depend on delivery partners, vendors, and organisations you do not control