Head of AI / Lead AI Engineer

We are looking for a Head of AI / Lead AI Engineer to own the technical side of the work end to end. Half the role is technical, half is a negotiation: you will be the senior technical voice in the company.

opengate is a technology and consulting company and an Astana Hub resident. We work across three practices: AI and automation, software and cloud, business advisory. Our clients are large companies in Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

Required:

• 5+ years in production ML/NLP: systems that ran under load and that you supported after launch.
• Breadth across the modern AI stack — LLM applications, retrieval, agents and automation — plus real depth in at least one of classical ML, forecasting or computer vision.
• Technical leadership: you have owned stack decisions for a team or a product line, reviewed other people's work, and been accountable for delivery beyond your own tasks.
• Python at production level: typing, tests, code review.
• RAG end to end: hybrid retrieval, chunking strategies, re-ranking, evaluation methodology.
• Vector stores (pgvector, Qdrant, Weaviate, FAISS) and a practical sense of how they differ. Embeddings: model selection, multilingual and domain-specific data.
• Self-hosted inference of open-weight models (vLLM, TGI, Ollama, llama.cpp), quantisation, GPU sizing.
• Eval sets and regression runs: how you prove a new version is not worse than the last one.
• Docker and Linux, deployment onto client infrastructure. Document parsing and extraction from unstructured sources.
• Enterprise security requirements: access control, audit logging, handling personal data.
• Able to defend an architecture in front of an IT director, scope a project and estimate honestly.
• Fluent Russian; English sufficient for documentation and papers.
• Nice to have: Kazakh, OCR and scanned-document processing, regulated industries such as banking, public sector or heavy industry, integrations with 1C and ERP systems, Kubernetes and Yandex Cloud, MLflow, DVC, Weights & Biases, experience hiring and growing an engineering team.

We care about what you took into production, and about what you decided rather than what you were handed. A technology list on a CV tells us very little.

• Own the architecture of opengate's AI work end to end, from discovery through to production and support.
• Build across the stack as the problem demands: retrieval and RAG, agents and process automation, applied NLP, predictive models, computer vision.
• Define how quality is measured on every project, and defend those numbers in front of the client.
• Deploy into closed environments: no external APIs, client infrastructure, real audit and access-control requirements.
• Set the technical standards — stack choices, review, delivery quality — and hold them across projects.
• Take part in technical meetings with IT directors and explain architectural decisions.
• Turn delivered work into reusable components so the next project does not start from zero.
• Bring in and direct specialist contractors on narrow, deep problems.
• Grow the engineering team: take part in hiring, review work, mentor.
• Work directly with the founders on technical strategy.

• ₸1,000,000–1,400,000 gross per month, position in the range depending on experience.
• One paid trial month, then a three-month probation.
• Delivery bonuses.
• Hybrid, Almaty office.
• Real ownership of technical decisions, a direct line to the founders, and no long approval chains: choices are made in days, not quarters.