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

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 [email protected] with the subject line: AI Engineer (Iraq)