Principal Data & AI Engineer

Company Description Open Valor is a Saudi deep technology company focused on building sovereign causal intelligence solutions for nations and critical industries. The company’s Sovereign Decision Layer transforms fragmented operational data into explainable, predictive, and autonomous intelligence. These solutions help organizations make faster, more accurate decisions across critical infrastructure and mission-critical operations. Open Valor operates at the intersection of advanced AI, data engineering, and national-scale systems, offering opportunities to work on high-impact, real-world challenges. Team members collaborate in a fast-paced, innovation-driven environment with a strong emphasis on technical excellence and responsible AI.Role Description The Principal Data & AI Engineer is a full-time, on-site role based in Riyadh, to help build advanced AI systems, large-scale data platforms, and intelligent decision infrastructure.This role is intended for engineers who enjoy solving difficult technical problems, building production-grade systems, and working across AI, data, distributed systems, and platform architecture.You will be expected to operate with significant technical ownership and contribute directly to the architecture, implementation, and evolution of core platform capabilities.What You’ll Do* Design and build large-scale AI and data systems.* Develop production-grade machine learning and AI services.* Build and optimize data pipelines for structured and unstructured data.* Design and implement agentic AI workflows and intelligent automation systems.* Build scalable backend services and distributed systems.* Improve system reliability, observability, performance, and maintainability.* Contribute to architecture decisions and technical direction.* Mentor engineers and help raise the overall engineering bar.What We’re Looking For* Strong software engineering fundamentals.* Experience building production AI, machine learning, or large-scale data systems.* Strong proficiency in Python.* Experience with distributed systems, cloud platforms, or data-intensive applications.* Deep understanding of system design, scalability, and reliability.* Ability to work independently and solve complex technical problems.* Strong communication and collaboration skills.Preferred Experience* Experience with LLMs, RAG, Agentic AI, MLOps, or AI Infrastructure.* Experience with distributed training, inference optimization, or large-scale AI workloads.* Experience building platforms, products, or systems from the ground up.* Research publications, patents, open-source contributions, or notable technical projects.Why Join* Work on technically challenging problems with real-world impact.* Significant ownership and influence over core technical decisions.* Opportunity to help shape the foundations of a deep-tech company from an early stage.* Small team, high trust, and high technical standards.Saudi Nationals Only.