Principal AI Engineer

About the Role: Principal AI Engineer

Tandem Search is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to join their team in Al Khobar, Eastern, Saudi Arabia. This full-time position requires 5-10 years of experience and focuses on leading the technical direction for production AI systems that operate over live video streams in real-world environments.

Role Overview and Technical Leadership

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, distinct from a people-management position. The Principal AI Engineer will be responsible for architecting, building, optimizing, and deploying advanced computer vision, video understanding, and multimodal/Vision-Language Model (VLM) systems. The role also involves providing technical direction to senior engineers while maintaining a highly hands-on approach with code.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and build production computer vision and video analytics systems.
• Develop solutions across object detection, segmentation, tracking, event understanding, and spatial reasoning.
• Design and deploy VLM/multimodal AI systems operating over live and recorded video.
• Own the full ML lifecycle, including data strategy, experimentation, fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
• Optimize models for edge and cloud inference, balancing accuracy, latency, throughput, and cost.
• Establish automated model evaluation, regression testing, and production monitoring.
• Develop agentic AI systems capable of reasoning over video and interacting safely with tools, APIs, cameras, and sensors.
• Set technical architecture and engineering standards while remaining highly hands-on with code.

Required Qualifications and Experience

Candidates must possess substantial hands-on experience with video-based computer vision systems; profiles focused purely on GenAI/LLM without strong production video/CV experience will not be suitable.

• Deep hands-on experience in Computer Vision / Video AI.
• Strong production experience working with live or streaming video.
• Proficiency in PyTorch and/or TensorFlow.
• Expertise across detection, segmentation, and tracking using technologies such as YOLO, DETR/RT-DETR, GroundingDINO, or equivalent.
• Production experience with Vision-Language Models / multimodal models such as Qwen-VL, InternVL, LLaVA, Gemini, or equivalent.
• Experience deploying and optimizing AI models in production.
• Exposure to edge AI, ideally TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, NVIDIA Jetson, or similar.
• Strong understanding of model evaluation, MLOps, active learning, and production monitoring.
• Ability to operate as a Principal/Staff-level technical authority while remaining hands-on.

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Experience with Agentic AI / tool-calling systems such as LangGraph, LangChain, or equivalent.
• Familiarity with real-time CCTV, camera, or video-streaming systems.
• Industrial, construction, robotics, autonomous systems, or safety-critical AI experience.
• Knowledge of RAG / multimodal retrieval and vector search.
• Experience with self-hosted VLM/LLM serving such as vLLM or NIM.

Location and Application

This full-time position is based in Al Khobar, Eastern, Saudi Arabia. Further details regarding the application process will be provided upon inquiry.