Director - Research and Development

Inception, a G42 company, is the region’s leading innovator of AI-powered domain-specific as well as industry-agnostic products, built on a rich heritage of research and development. Within the G42 ecosystem, Inception functions as the core intelligence layer – transforming data and compute infrastructure into real-world, applied AI solutions. Beyond its commercial endeavors, Inception is committed to creating positive societal impact. For more information, please visit www.inceptionai.ai

Overview:

Abu Dhabi

Inception42, a G42 company, is the region’s leading innovator of AI-powered domain-specific as well as industry-agnostic products, built on a rich heritage of research and development. Within the G42 ecosystem, Inception42 functions as the core intelligence layer – transforming data and compute infrastructure into real-world, applied AI solutions. Beyond its commercial endeavors, Inception42 is committed to creating positive societal impact. For more information, please visit www.inceptionai.ai

Inception is seeking an accomplished Director of R&D in Applied AI, with a proven track record of directing multi-program applied research portfolios, to lead our applied AI research function. This role offers the rare opportunity to set the technical direction across multiple flagship programs in parallel — including a foundation language model family and multi-agent and agentic systems research— while providing oversight to high-stakes client delivery tracks that bring those research outputs into production.

Responsibilities:

In the Director of R&D role you will own the active applied research portfolio of the function, set its technical direction, and represent it at executive and Board level. You will direct concurrent flagship programs in foundation language models and multi-agent systems, while overseeing client delivery tracks that productize those research outputs. You will be the named technical arbiter on release, IP and prioritization decisions, and the senior point of contact for our most strategic external partners.

o     Own the active R&D portfolio end-to-end — research roadmap, milestones, resource allocation and quarterly reviews.

o     Direct the foundation language model program end-to-end — pre-training, post-training (instruction tuning, alignment), evaluation (language quality, multilingual performance, and safety posture), and release.

o     Provide oversight to high-stakes client and delivery tracks and run regular reviews with R&D team covering progress, blockers, and re-allocation decisions across active programs.

o     Represent Inception R&D in CEO-, group-executive- and Board-level forums, with the ability to make impactful presentations.

o     Own the most strategic external partnerships academic research partners, frontier-model labs, the hyperscaler partnership cadence, sister-organization safety teams, and evaluation and red-teaming vendors — and lead joint workstreams to closure.

o     Lead a team of applied scientists and senior applied scientists through technical mentorship, performance and growth, hiring, and defining team shape and talent strategy.

o     Set and enforce R&D quality standards across projects and teams.

Qualifications:

The criteria for your success would include the maturity of the R&D portfolio you direct, foundation-model releases shipped under your sign-off, the health and growth of the Applied Science team, the depth of strategic partnerships sustained, and the readiness of research outputs for executive and Board consumption.

o     M.Sc. or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or an AI-related field. Specialization in NLP, large language models, or applied ML is highly desirable.

o     Minimum 10 years of experience in AI / ML, with at least 4 years in a technical leadership or director-level role directing multiple concurrent research programs.

o     Demonstrated ownership of at least one production foundation-model release end-to-end.

o     Strong publication record in major NLP / ML venues, or an equivalent product-driven research and IP-filing track record.

o     Production experience with Arabic or other lower-resource-language NLP at scale.

o     Experience deploying AI Models into regulated or government contexts, including content moderation and policy-aligned guardrails.

o     Hands-on familiarity with agentic-AI architectures — planning, tool use, multi-agent simulation.

o     Excellent written and verbal communication.

Inception42 is building AI systems designed for practical deployment at scale — across industries, infrastructure, and national-level initiatives.

If you want to work close to both advanced AI capability and real-world execution, we’d like to hear from you.