Lead Applied AI Engineer – Global Boutique Investment Manager – Nascent AI Team + Greenfield Projects

A global boutique investment firm is continuing to build out its technology organization with a focus on applying modern AI capabilities across investment, research, and operational workflows. The firm operates with a highly entrepreneurial culture and is investing in a new generation of internal platforms designed to improve how investment professionals access information, evaluate opportunities, and automate complex decision-making processes. Currently the team is seeking a Lead Applied AI Engineer to own the design and delivery of production AI systems across the business. This individual will work directly with investment professionals, senior leadership, and engineering teams to identify high-value use cases and translate them into scalable applications. The right profile will combine strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on experience building and deploying modern AI systems in production.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of applied AI systems supporting investment research, knowledge management, data analysis, workflow automation, and other front office use cases.
• Build production applications utilizing large language models, retrieval systems, agentic workflows, structured and unstructured data, and modern machine learning infrastructure.
• Work directly with investment professionals and senior stakeholders to identify high-value AI opportunities and translate business requirements into practical technical solutions.
• Own AI projects throughout the full development lifecycle, including architecture, prototyping, model evaluation, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing improvement.
• Develop scalable integrations between AI applications and internal data platforms, APIs, research systems, document repositories, and other enterprise technology.
• Provide technical leadership across the applied AI function, establish engineering standards, mentor other engineers, and help define the firm’s broader AI strategy.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong software engineering experience with demonstrated success designing and deploying production applications using Python and modern backend technologies.
• Hands-on experience building applications with large language models, including areas such as retrieval augmented generation, agentic systems, model evaluation, prompt and context engineering, embeddings, and structured tool use.
• Strong understanding of machine learning systems, APIs, distributed applications, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, testing, observability, and production deployment.
• Experience working with unstructured data, document processing, search, knowledge systems, or other information retrieval technologies is strongly preferred.
• Strong analytical and product instincts with the ability to identify where AI can create meaningful business value rather than applying technology for its own sake.
• Ability to operate independently in a small, high-performing environment and work directly with senior investment and business stakeholders.
• The firm has a significant presence in Dubai, and candidates who are open to relocating and working closely with the team there will be prioritized.