AI Engineer

AI Engineer Location: Iraq (Hybrid) Company: Swibit Employment Type: Full-time Reports To: Engineering Manager, AI About Swibit Swibit is an AI solutions company operating in the MENA region, the UK, and the US. We specialise in delivering high-end consulting and building scalable digital platforms, AI-powered products, and strategic solutions across sectors such as real estate, marketplaces, logistics, education, and public services. Our model is global design and local execution — combining international expertise with deep local market understanding to deliver impactful, future-ready solutions. Role Overview We are looking for an AI Engineer to join our AI team in Iraq. You will build, fine-tune, and deploy AI/ML models and intelligent systems that power Swibit's products — from Arabic NLP and document intelligence to recommendation engines, computer vision, and agentic AI workflows. Swibit is an AI-first company. AI is not a feature we bolt on — it is the core of what we build and sell. You will work on real production systems solving real problems for clients across Iraq and the MENA region. Key Responsibilities AI/ML Development Build, train, fine-tune, and evaluate machine learning models for production use Develop NLP solutions with a focus on Arabic language — text classification, NER, summarisation, sentiment analysis Build and maintain LLM-powered applications — RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, prompt engineering Develop document intelligence systems — OCR, document parsing, information extraction Implement recommendation systems, search, and ranking algorithms Work with computer vision models where required (object detection, image classification) Production & Integration Deploy models as production-grade APIs using FastAPI and containerised services Integrate AI capabilities into Swibit's backend services and client platforms Optimise model performance — latency, throughput, cost, and accuracy trade-offs Build evaluation pipelines and monitoring for model performance in production Manage data pipelines for training, validation, and inference Ensure AI systems respect data sovereignty and client privacy requirements Collaboration & Research Collaborate with Backend Engineers to integrate AI into product workflows Work with Product Owners and Business Analysts to translate business problems into AI solutions Stay current with the AI/ML landscape — new models, techniques, and tools Contribute to Swibit's AI Collective — internal knowledge sharing and best practices Participate in sprint planning, daily standups, and retrospectives Mentor junior engineers and Academy graduates Requirements Essential Based in Iraq (able to work from the office on a hybrid schedule) 2–4 years of professional experience in AI/ML engineering (not just academic/research) Strong proficiency in Python — production-grade, clean, well-structured code Hands-on experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow Experience with NLP — particularly transformer-based models (BERT, GPT, T5 family) Experience building applications with LLMs — OpenAI API, Hugging Face, or open-source models Familiarity with LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar LLM orchestration frameworks Understanding of ML fundamentals — training, evaluation, overfitting, feature engineering Experience deploying models as APIs (FastAPI, Flask) Comfortable with Git, pull requests, and collaborative development workflows Strong problem-solving skills and analytical thinking Fluency in Arabic and English (spoken and written) Preferred Experience with Arabic NLP — tokenisation, morphological analysis, Arabic-specific models (AraBERT, Jais, ALLaM) Experience with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines and vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant) Familiarity with computer vision (YOLO, ResNet, OpenCV) Experience with MLOps — experiment tracking (MLflow, W&B), model versioning, CI/CD for ML Knowledge of data engineering tools (Pandas, Spark, Airflow) Experience with cloud ML services (AWS SageMaker, Bedrock) Understanding of on-premises model deployment and sovereignty constraints Experience with OCR and document intelligence (Tesseract, Azure Document Intelligence, PaddleOCR) Previous experience in a startup or fast-paced product environment Tech Stack You'll Work With Layer Technologies Language Python 3.11+ ML Frameworks PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers LLM Tools LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI API NLP spaCy, NLTK, AraBERT, Jais Vector DBs Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate Serving FastAPI, Docker, Kubernetes MLOps MLflow, Weights & Biases Data PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Pandas Cloud AWS (SageMaker, Bedrock, EC2, S3) CI/CD GitHub Actions What You'll Gain Build AI systems that solve real-world problems for users across Iraq and MENA Work at the centre of an AI-first company — not in a sidelined R&D lab Tackle Arabic NLP challenges that few companies in the region are working on at this level Close collaboration with an international team including AI advisors with Google DeepMind and IBM Watson backgrounds Clear career growth path within Swibit's AI team (Engineer → Senior → AI Lead) Structured mentorship and access to the Swibit Academy learning programmes A fast-paced, ambitious environment where AI is the business, not a side project Competitive compensation with performance-based incentives How to Apply Send your CV, a link to your GitHub or portfolio, and any published papers or projects to hr@swibit.com with the subject line: AI Engineer (Iraq)