AI Engineer

AI - ML, Software Engineering

Abu Dhabi, Dubai

• AI Engineer – Prop Trading – UAE – Up to $250,000 USD total
• Opportunities to do genuinely frontier AI research at a prop trading firm in the UAE are rare.
• Most firms with real research ambition keep their ML teams in New York, London, or Singapore.
• This is one of the few exceptions, and the pedigree behind it is exceptional.
• The UAE is a central part of their future.
• The office is growing quickly and is already home to senior AI researchers, quant leads, and strategy leadership.
• The team is small by design with a clear and funded plan to scale significantly.
• The people joining now will shape the culture, the tooling, and the direction of the research programme.
• Alongside this, the firm has secured compute resources allowing them to do large-scale foundational model work.
• Why you’d want this role
• A rare opportunity to do frontier AI research within a live trading business, where your models feed real systems
• Flat structure with direct exposure to senior leadership from day one
• Access to serious compute infrastructure
• Work across the full model lifecycle — training, evaluation, in-depth analysis, and innovation
• A team assembled from some of the best minds in HFT and AI globally

Why Abu Dhabi

• Consistently ranked among the safest and most liveable cities in the world
• One of the fastest-growing hubs for buy-side finance and AI in the region
• Significant tax advantages over London, New York, or Singapore
• The most sought-after neighbourhoods are a 10–20 minute drive from the office — no packed commutes, no tube strikes, and a cab is around £8 each way
• Year-round sunshine and world-class infrastructure
• What you’ll be doing
• Designing and building frameworks that underpin the firm’s next-generation ML platforms and trading systems
• Ensuring compatibility with modern cloud infrastructure, leading ML libraries, and state-of-the-art model architectures
• Running large-scale training experiments and contributing to rigorous, in-depth model evaluation and analysis
• Working closely with researchers and engineers across multiple offices on foundational model research spanning language, vision, multimodal, and structured data
• What you’ll bring
• Proven, hands-on experience with large foundational models — training, evaluation, and analysis
• Advanced Python development in a Linux environment
• Strong grounding in deep learning, generative AI, and modern model architectures
• Direct experience with multi-GPU training at scale
• A track record building high-performance software with demonstrable results
• Familiarity with parallel computing frameworks and performance optimisation
• Intellectual curiosity, a bias toward open-source tooling, and genuine interest in* ing ML to trading and research problems
• A team-first mentality and the kind of work ethic that thrives in a high-trust, high-output environment
• We recognise that great engineers don’t always fit neatly into a checklist.
• If this sounds like the kind of work you want to be doing, reach out directly, even if you’re unsure whether you’re the right fit. josh@durlstonpartners.com
• If this role isn’t right for you but you know someone who’d be a great fit, we have a market-leading referral scheme in place to thank anyone who refers to a candidate who successfully passes probation.