Job description

Job Purpose

At Emirates, we believe in connecting the world, to and through, our global hub in Dubai; and in constantly innovating to ensure our customers ‘Fly Better’. Do you want to play a part in that journey and own technical products used by stakeholders and customers across the world? Join us in Cosmopolitan Dubai as a Senior Software Engineer and make your mark on the aviation world!

As an Senior Technical Software Engineer in our AI platform team, you will design and build secure, scalable AI capabilities for use across the group (LLM, SLM and open-weight model integrations, agentic AI services, MCP servers/tools and Skills) packaged as re-usable components and accelerators for portfolio teams. You will implement the patterns that make AI production-ready: model routing and fallback, prompt caching and context management, retrieval and grounding, evaluation harnesses and AI-native observability (tracing, token/cost and quality telemetry). Responsible AI is central to the role — you will build in guardrails, input/output filtering and secure handling of data, secrets and model access, and apply grounding, citation and evaluation techniques to detect and reduce hallucination, bias and prompt-injection risk, in line with group security, privacy and regulatory requirements. You will get hands-on with managed AI services on AWS, Azure and GCP (e.g. Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry/OpenAI, Vertex AI), integrating them into business-critical solutions with the performance, compliance and maintainability expected across the software lifecycle. The job also includes planning/estimation, application development, deployment, release, hyper-care and operation of developed solutions.

In this role, you will:

• Collaborate with the team to deliver technical design, development and deployment of complex solutions within relevant product. Carry out effective technical design reviews to ensure that the right architecture patterns are used by the team.
• Drive the adoption of Engineering practices, implement development process automation, lean software development, built-in-quality, test driven development, agile practices, and timely root cause analysis and blameless incident post-mortems.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to determine viability of solutions. Evaluate current problems, future requirements and existing solutions in medium to large projects to enable high level design and drive proof-of-concepts and implement prototypes to validate ideas.
• Investigate, debug and fix complex issues involving corner cases and rare conditions. Support continuous improvement by investigating alternatives and new technologies and presenting these for architectural review.
• Contribute to sprint/work design and planning by providing subject matter expertise on business domain and relevant technologies and actively contribute to technology specific community of practices.
• Manage and mentor Software Engineers to allow for skill/knowledge development through advice, coaching, and training opportunities. Responsible for their technical deliveries and adherence to design and coding standards and practices.
• Ensure optimal use of enterprise application platforms, tools and libraries in line with the approved technology architecture.
• Responsible for corrective, adaptive, preventative and perfective maintenance of products in collaboration with other capabilities for the relevant product.

This job might be for you if you have:

• Degree or Honours (12+3 or equivalent).
• Minimum of 5+ years of experience in Information Technology.
• Experience of developing advanced/complex technology Software solutions for large, complex organisations in a multi-functional environment.
• Experience developing and/or integrating AI solutions, whether through in-house development or leveraging managed AI services
• Practical experience building with LLMs, SLMs and open-weight models — prompt engineering and caching, RAG/vector search, MCP-based tool integration, agent frameworks, evaluation and tracing/observability of AI applications in production.
• Hands-on, demonstrable experience with AI services on at least one hyperscaler - AWS (Bedrock, SageMaker), Azure (AI Foundry/Azure OpenAI, AI Search) or GCP (Vertex AI, Gemini) - with experience across two or all three considered a strong advantage.
• Experience with agent/orchestration frameworks (e.g. LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, Strands, ADK) and building MCP servers.
• Understanding of responsible AI and AI security fundamentals — guardrails, content filtering, prompt-injection and data-leakage risks, grounding and citation to reduce hallucination, and safe handling of secrets, PII and model access.
• Exposure to full stack development across UI, middleware and databases, sufficient to integrate AI capabilities end to end.

Nice to have:

• Experience with evaluation and observability tooling for AI (e.g. LangSmith, Langfuse, Ragas, Arize, Azure AI Evaluation).
• Relevant cloud certification (AWS ML/AI, Azure AI Engineer Associate, Google Cloud ML Engineer).
• Experience fine-tuning or self-hosting open-weight models (e.g. Llama, Mistral, Qwen) and understanding of when small models are the better fit.

Leadership Role: NO

Join us in a management role and enjoy an attractive tax-free salary. On top of our generous travel benefits, including discounted flights and hotel stays around the world, this managerial role also has an excellent leave and healthcare package. That’s on top of transport benefits, life insurance and more. Find out what it’s like to live and work in our fast-paced, cosmopolitan home city in the Dubai Lifestyle section of our website www.emirates.com/careers.