AI Engineer

About Alaan
Alaan is an AI-native finance platform for businesses in the Middle East. The platform combines corporate cards, expense management, cross-border payments, accounting automation, treasury, business banking*, and more, with AI doing the work finance teams used to do by hand: coding transactions, chasing approvals and receipts, flagging policy breaches, placing treasury deposits, and closing the books.
Our mission is to simplify finance for businesses so they can save time and money.
Over 3,000 businesses use Alaan, from first-time founders to enterprises like Careem, G42, Tabby, Al Barari, and Rivoli. Since 2022, they have saved more than 2.2 million hours of manual finance work.
Alaan has raised $55Mn to date, including one of the largest Series A rounds in Middle East history, backed by Peak XV (formerly Sequoia India), Y Combinator, 468 Capital, and 885 Capital, among others. Headquartered in Dubai, Alaan has more than 250 employees across its Dubai, Riyadh, and Bangalore offices, with a team that comes from Careem, McKinsey, BCG, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Revolut, Rippling, and the world’s leading firms.
Alaan has been named to the Forbes Fintech 50 list, UAE Future 100 list, selected as an Endeavor company, and ranked the No. 1 spend management platform in EMEA by G2.
*Alaan is a fintech company, not a bank. Business bank accounts are issued by ruya.
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're 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

Work arrangement
Hybrid