Deployment Lead — Dubai / London

Deployment Lead — Dubai / London (1001.ai)

1001.ai is hiring a Deployment Lead to own end-to-end AI deployments with flagship clients — ministries, sovereign funds, and large enterprises in the Gulf. The Deployment Lead scopes the problem, marshals 1001.ai engineers, sits in the room with very senior stakeholders, and is personally accountable for the deployment working in production.

Location: split between Dubai and London — roughly 60/40 Dubai-weighted in year one. Candidates must be genuinely enthusiastic about substantial time in Dubai, and must hold or credibly obtain UK right to work.

The ideal profile is a Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer or Deployment Strategist, three to seven years in, who has led at least one deployment end-to-end rather than executed inside one. Also strong: forward-deployed / field engineering at top AI companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral applied teams), deployment or solutions leads from Databricks or similar infrastructure companies, and ex-MBB consultants who have since done real operating time at a technical company.

Requirements:

• 4–8 years out of undergrad with a clear step-up in ownership over that time
• Technical enough to be credible with engineers; comfortable in ambiguity with demanding clients; trained to own outcomes rather than deliverables
• Top-tier university only: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, LSE, UCL (right course) in the UK; Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, CMU in the US. Strong technical degree preferred (engineering, CS, maths, physics)
• Hard exclusion: no ScaleAI background — firm no regardless of the rest of the profile
• Nice-to-haves: Arabic, Gulf/MENA exposure, government or defence client experience, evidence of hiring or managing a small team

Seniority calibration: senior enough to hold a room with a minister's office; not a 15-year enterprise sales veteran repackaged as a deployment person.