1001 AI — ML Researcher (P1)
About 1001 AI: AI-native OS for MENA heavy industries (aviation, construction, ports, energy). Lux Capital / General Catalyst / CIV backed. Founder Bilal Abu-Ghazaleh (ex-Director, GenAI Ops at Scale AI). Engineering team mostly ex-Scale AI / Palantir. Locations: London + Doha + Dubai + Abu Dhabi.
One-line pitch: Research-focused ML hire to build the models that sit behind the optimizer and similar systems. Drives the technical ceiling of the applied research stack.
Responsibilities:
- Design, train, and validate the ML models that power the optimizer and adjacent systems
- Work on applied industrial problems where the goal is production impact
- Lead research on RL-guided optimization, world models, and simulation-driven learning as it applies to our use cases
- Translate research into shipping artifacts that the engineering team can integrate
- Stay close to the literature and bring frontier techniques into our stack
- Mentor and uplift the broader ML team
Requirements:
- Published research output with first-author publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, JMLR, or equivalent)
- Strong enough technically that a small applied team can be grounded around their work
- Able to implement their own research — ships code, not just papers
- Comfortable in high-ownership early stage environment where scope is broad and changes quickly
- Strong engineering judgement over tool-specific knowledge
- Uses AI coding agents effectively but remains fully accountable for code quality
Bonus:
- Experience with RL, model-based planning, simulation, or operations research applied to industrial problems
- Prior enterprise deployment experience
- Comfortable with hybrid / on-prem / sovereign cloud enterprise deployments
Pedigree: PhD from a top program (Stanford, MIT, CMU, Oxford, Cambridge, Berkeley, ETH, EPFL, Princeton, UT Austin, UCL, Imperial, KCL, Edinburgh, Mila, Tsinghua, Tokyo) OR top industry research lab (Google DeepMind, FAIR, Microsoft Research, Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale AI research, Cohere research, Mistral, NVIDIA Research, Apple ML).
Locations: London, Doha, Dubai, or Abu Dhabi (Qatar priority #1; UAE #2; London = main non-US talent hub).