Head of AI / Lead AI Engineer at opengate

Head of AI / Lead AI Engineer
opengate
1,000,000 to 1,400,000 KZT Gross per month
Almaty / Office

opengate is a technology and consulting company and an Astana Hub resident, working across AI and automation, software and cloud, and business advisory for large companies in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. The role leads AI work from discovery through production and support, including retrieval and RAG, agents, process automation, applied NLP, predictive models, and computer vision.

Responsibilities:
• Own AI architecture from discovery through production and support.
• Build retrieval and RAG, agents, process automation, applied NLP, predictive models, and computer vision.
• Define project quality metrics and defend them before clients.
• Deploy in closed environments with client infrastructure, audit, and access-control requirements.
• Set technical standards, stack choices, review, and delivery quality across projects.
• Develop reusable components, direct specialist contractors, grow the engineering team, and work with founders on technical strategy.

Requirements:
• 5+ years in production ML/NLP
• Breadth across the modern AI stack
• Technical leadership
• Production-level Python
• RAG end to end, vector stores, and embeddings
• Self-hosted inference of open-weight models
• Building evaluation sets and regression runs
• Docker, Linux, and data pipelines
• Enterprise security requirements
• Ability to scope projects and defend architecture
• Fluent Russian and sufficient English for documentation

Optional:
• Kazakh
• OCR and scanned-document processing
• Experience hiring and growing an engineering team
• Integrations with 1C, ERP systems, and internal portals
• Kubernetes, Yandex Cloud, and work in closed environments
• MLOps tooling: MLflow, DVC, Weights & Biases
• Experience in regulated industries