AI Engineer

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.