AI Engineer

About Alaan

Alaan is the Middle East’s first AI-powered spend management platform, built to help businesses save time and money.
Our all-in-one solution combines smart corporate cards, real-time expense tracking, AI-powered automation, seamless accounting integrations, and deep financial insights- designed to simplify finance operations and maximize control over company spend.

Founded in 2022, Alaan is already the trusted partner of over 2000 leading businesses across the UAE and KSA, including G42, Careem, McDonald’s, Tabby, Al Barari, Rove Hotels, Rivoli, and CarSwitch. Together, our customers have saved over AED 100 million with Alaan.

In just three years, Alaan has become the #1 expense management platform in the Middle East- and we’ve done it while becoming profitable.

Alaan is also backed by Y Combinator and top global investors, including Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India & SEA), and built by a world-class team with experience from McKinsey, BCG, Goldman Sachs, Careem, Rippling, and other high-growth companies. This creates an environment where employees learn from top-tier talent while building at startup speed.

We’re not just building software. We’re reimagining how finance works for modern businesses across the region.

About the role

As an AI Engineer, you will own the development of production-grade AI applications - from early experimentation and prototyping to evaluation, deployment, and continuous improvement.

This is not a pure research position. You will be expected to combine strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on experience building applications using large language models and modern AI infrastructure.

You will work on problems such as extracting and structuring financial data, automating expense workflows, building intelligent assistants, and helping customers interact more effectively with their financial information.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and deploy AI-powered features across Alaan’s products.
• Create reliable workflows for prompt management, model orchestration, tool calling, and structured outputs.
• Build backend services and APIs that integrate AI capabilities into production applications.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to measure the accuracy, relevance, reliability, latency, and cost of AI outputs.
• Experiment with different models, prompting techniques, embeddings, retrieval strategies, and fine-tuning approaches.
• Implement appropriate safeguards for sensitive financial and customer information.
• Monitor AI systems in production and continuously improve their performance using user feedback and evaluation data.
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Designers, Data teams, and Backend Engineers to identify high-impact AI use cases.
• Stay informed about developments in applied AI and determine which technologies are genuinely useful for Alaan.

What we are looking for

MUST HAVES:

• 2+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful hands-on experience building AI or machine-learning-powered applications.
• Strong programming skills in both Python and Node.js, with experience using them to build production-grade AI applications and backend services.
• Hands-on experience with AWS SageMaker for developing, training, deploying, and monitoring machine learning or AI workloads.
• Proficiency with Jupyter Notebooks for data exploration, experimentation, model development, and prototyping.
• Hands-on experience with Weights & Biases (W&B) for experiment tracking, model evaluation, versioning, and performance monitoring.
• Hands-on experience working with large language models and their APIs.
• Practical understanding of prompt engineering, embeddings, vector search and RAG.
• Hands-on experience with prompt version control and management of a complete lifecycle of individual business use cases end to end.
• Experience with databases such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB and at least one vector database or vector-search solution like OpenSearch.
• Experience evaluating AI applications beyond manual testing or subjective output reviews.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Good understanding of software engineering principles, including testing, version control, observability, scalability, and security.
• Strong product judgement and the ability to translate loosely defined business problems into practical AI solutions.
• Ability to move quickly between experimentation and production-quality implementation.

GOOD TO HAVES:

• Experience with frameworks such as LangChain, PromptFoo, LangFuse, or similar AI orchestration tools.
• Experience with model evaluation, guardrails, observability, and monitoring platforms.
• Experience with Snowflake or a similar data warehouse/lake.
• Experience fine-tuning, adapting, or serving open-source models.
• Experience working with document intelligence, OCR, classification, recommendation systems, or conversational AI.
• Experience with harnesses and agent loops (experience with self healing harness setups is a bonus)
• Experience building AI products involving financial, accounting, or other sensitive data.
• Previous experience in a fintech, SaaS, or high-growth startup environment.

What's in it for you

• Contribute to building the Middle East’s most beloved fintech brand from the ground up
• Benefit from a role with significant ownership and accountability
• Thrive in a flexible hybrid culture with ample work-life balance
• Participate in exciting offsite events
• Competitive salary and equity
• Enjoy additional perks like travel allowances, gym memberships, and more