---
title: 'Senior MLOps Engineer at Institute of Foundation Models'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-mlops-engineer-institute-of-foundation-models-abu-dhabi-55n6yad9bjsr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-26'
---

# Senior MLOps Engineer at Institute of Foundation Models

- **Company:** Institute of Foundation Models
- **Location:** Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-11-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-26
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/ifm-us/5f0feab3-1309-4c24-a703-ed1993c448b9

## Job description

## About the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM)

The Institute of Foundation Models is a dedicated research lab for building, understanding, deploying, and risk-managing large-scale AI systems. We drive innovation in foundation models and their operationalization, empowering research, education, and industry adoption through scalable infrastructure and real-world applications. As part of our engineering team, you will operate at the intersection of machine learning and systems design — building the cloud, orchestration, and deployment layers that power the next generation of intelligent applications at MBZUAI. You’ll work alongside world-class AI researchers and engineers to productionize LLMs, voice models, and multimodal systems at scale.

## The Role

As a Senior MLOps Engineer, you will design, build, and maintain robust ML(Machine Learning) infrastructure across training, inference, and deployment pipelines. You will take ownership of the model lifecycle — from data ingestion to real-time serving — and ensure our LLM and speech models are deployed efficiently, securely, and reproducibly in Kubernetes-based environments. This position requires deep hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), Helm, AWS cloud infrastructure, and modern MLOps toolchains (e.g., vLLM, SGLang, OpenWebUI, Weights & Biases, MLflow). Familiarity with speech/voice AI frameworks like ElevenLabs, Whisper, and RVC is also valuable.

## Key Responsibilities

- Design and manage scalable ML infrastructure on AWS using EKS, EC2, RDS, S3, and IAM-based access control.
- Build and maintain Kubernetes deployments for LLM and TTS inference using Helm, ArgoCD, and Prometheus/Grafana monitoring.
- Implement and optimize model serving pipelines using vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT, or similar frameworks for high-throughput inference.
- Develop CI/CD and MLOps automation for data versioning, model validation, and deployment (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or AWS CodePipeline).
- Integrate OpenWebUI, Gradio, or similar UIs for user-facing model demos and internal evaluation tools.
- Collaborate with ML researchers to productize models — including TTS (e.g., ElevenLabs API), ASR (Whisper), and LLM-based chat systems.
- Ensure observability, cost optimization, and reliability of cloud resources across multiple environments.
- Contribute to internal tools for dataset curation, model monitoring, and retraining pipelines.
- Maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and Helm charts for reproducibility and governance.
- Support real-time multimodal workloads (voice, text, vision) across inference clusters.

Academic Qualifications

- 4+ years of experience in MLOps, DevOps, or Cloud Infrastructure Engineering for ML systems.
- Strong proficiency in Kubernetes, Helm, and container orchestration.
- Experience deploying ML models via vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT, or Ray Serve.
- Proficiency with AWS services (EKS, EC2, S3, RDS, CloudWatch, IAM).
- Solid experience with Python, Docker, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Strong understanding of model lifecycle management, data pipelines, and observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki).
- Excellent collaboration skills with ML researchers and software engineers.

Professional Experience – Preferred

- Extensive Experience with vLLM, K8s, Elevenlabs, Whisper, Gradio/OpenWebUI, or custom TTS/ASR model hosting.
- Familiarity with multi-GPU scheduling, NCCL optimization, and HPC cluster integration.
- Knowledge of security, cost management, and network policy in multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters and cloudflare systems.
- Prior work in LLM deployment, fine-tuning pipelines, or foundation model research.
- Exposure to data governance and responsible AI operations in research or enterprise settings.

## About Institute of Foundation Models

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: The Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) is a global AI research lab dedicated to the open and independent development of frontier-class foundation models, operating under the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).
- **Entity Type**: Academic Research Institute (part of MBZUAI, a university)
- **Headquarters**: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (with labs in Sunnyvale, CA, USA and Paris, France)
- **Founded**: 2026 (launched with Silicon Valley lab)
- **Founders**: Part of MBZUAI, led by President Eric Xing

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence research, foundation model development, open-source AI
- **Target customers**: Researchers, academia, industry partners, and the global AI community (B2B/Research/Public sector)
- **Mission**: To produce the world’s leading models across modalities while ensuring responsible, open, and socially meaningful impact.

## Products & Services
For each major offering:
- **JAIS Series**: State-of-the-art open-source Arabic LLM covering Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects, including Moroccan Arabic (Darija). Fully documented training lifecycle.
- **Vicuna**: Lightweight open chatbot surpassing 90% of ChatGPT and Bard quality.
- **K2 (K2-65B)**: Large language model with advanced reasoning capabilities, focusing on sustainable performance. Updated version soon to be released.
- **PAN World Model**: Next-gen foundation model for embodied reasoning and physical-world simulation, integrating multimodal inputs (language, video, spatial data, physical actions). Includes PAN-Agent for multimodal reasoning tasks.
- **FM For Bio – GET**: Domain-specific model for biology.
- **LLM360**: Open-source framework enhancing transparency and collaboration in LLM research, providing training code, datasets, and model checkpoints.
- **Research partnerships**: Collaboration with academia, startups, and enterprises via shared compute, co-publishing, and co-development.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (non-commercial research institute)
- **Key Metric**: Funded by MBZUAI; specific budget not publicly disclosed. Notable open-source model releases (JAIS, Vicuna, K2, PAN).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: MBZUAI, with international advisory boards and peer review processes. Partnerships with industry leaders, academic institutions, and public organizations.
- **Growth Signals**: Launch of Silicon Valley lab in Sunnyvale, CA (2026); expansion into Paris and Abu Dhabi nodes; active hiring for research interns, distributed ML engineers, HPC engineers; release of flagship models (PAN, K2 update).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Openness & transparency**: Full release of training code, datasets, and model checkpoints through LLM360 – one of the most transparent approaches in AI.
- **Global research network**: Three hubs (Abu Dhabi, Silicon Valley, Paris) combining academic rigor with startup agility.
- **Access to large-scale compute**: High-performance computing infrastructure for training frontier models.
- **Multilingual & cultural focus**: JAIS addresses underrepresentation of Arabic and other languages, preserving cultural authenticity.
- **World model innovation**: PAN differentiates from text-only models by predicting comprehensive world states for advanced reasoning and simulation.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue building open, powerful foundation models across language, vision, multimodal, and domain-specific systems.
- Expand global collaboration and talent acquisition, especially in Silicon Valley.
- Advance responsible AI with safety systems and international advisory boards.
- Drive real-world impact through partnerships in scientific discovery, human-AI interaction, and public good.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Collaborative, cutting-edge academic research environment with a mission to open-source AI for global benefit. Teams span Abu Dhabi, Paris, and Silicon Valley.
- **Remote/hybrid/office**: All listed roles are **on-site** (Sunnyvale, CA or Abu Dhabi). No remote policy indicated.
- **Notable perks**: Work with world-class researchers, access to large-scale compute, opportunity to publish and contribute to open-source models. The institute combines the agility of a startup with the resources of an established university.
- **Current openings**: AI Research Internship (LLM), Distributed Machine Learning Engineer, Eval360 Error Analysis Engineer, High Performance Computing Software Engineer (Supercomputing) – all on-site in Sunnyvale or Abu Dhabi.

## Sources
1. [ifm.ai](https://ifm.ai/)
2. [ifm.ai/about](https://ifm.ai/about/)
3. [jobs.lever.co/ifm-us](https://jobs.lever.co/ifm-us)
4. [LinkedIn – Institute of Foundation Models](https://www.linkedin.com/company/institute-of-foundation-models)
5. [MBZUAI News – Launch of IFM and Silicon Valley Lab](https://mbzuai.ac.ae/news/mbzuai-launches-institute-of-foundation-models-and-establishes-silicon-valley-ai-lab/)

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