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.

The company is sawing cross-platform mobile phones on Flutter/Dart for iOS from scratch and Android keeps a single codebase and does not duplicate the same business logic for each platform. The architecture, state management, and related stack are tailored to specific features and product requirements, without overengineering for the sake of overengineering. The first MVP of the equipment rental service is currently assembling: it closes a critical flow, forms a backlog, completes features and prepares the product for the first release. Further along the roadmap is scaling the current product and entering the mobile game dev.

1. 3+ years of experience in B2B sales, partnerships, or business development.
2. Fluent in Kazakh, Russian, and English.
3. Strong communication and negotiation skills.
4. Experience working with international clients or markets.
5. Entrepreneurial mindset, proactiveness, and high ownership.
6. Strong plus: Experience in sports, AI, HealthTech, SaaS, or wearable tech.

• At least 6 years of experience as an HR Manager / HR Generalist / KDP Specialist
• Excellent knowledge of the labor legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan
• Full-time HR record-keeping experience
• Attention to detail, consistency and responsibility
• Confident mastery of Excel, Google Docs, 1C, ZUP, and HR tools
• Experience working with RVPs

• Banking experience (required)
• Experience working with B2B products (preferably)
• Practical experience in developing an Internet banking mobile application
• Understanding banking products (payments, loans, deposits, onboarding)
• Experience managing multiple teams/streams
• Skills in working with metrics, roadmap, and discovery processes

- Experience working with technological startup projects and understanding the specifics of solutions in the field of Smart City and artificial intelligence - at least 2 years.

- Practical skills in tracking and mentoring startup teams at different stages of development.

- Experience in conducting strategic sessions, foresight sessions, or strategic planning for project teams.

- Experience in public speaking, event moderation, and presentation sessions (Demo Day, pitch sessions).

- The ability to build an individual development trajectory for each team, taking into account its specifics.

- Communication skills with different audiences, from novice startups to representatives of working groups and the expert community.

- Higher education in information technology, data analysis, applied mathematics, computer science or related fields, or international certifications in Data Analytics, Big Data, Machine Learning and Generative AI (NVIDIA, Google, AWS, Microsoft, Databricks, DeepLearning.AI , Anthropic, OpenAI or similar).

- Practical work experience in the field of data analytics, Big Data, Data Science or Machine Learning for at least 5 years.

- Experience in implementing data analysis, ML and AI projects using AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform or similar technologies.

- Proficiency in Python (Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-learn, Jupyter Notebook), SQL, and modern data analysis tools.

- Practical experience working with Big Data technologies (Apache Spark, Hadoop, Hive, Databricks or similar).

- Experience in building analytical models, visualizing data, and developing machine learning-based solutions.

- Practical experience in using modern AI tools and generative AI to automate analytical processes.

- At least 1 year of experience in the development and implementation of educational programs in the field of data analytics, Big Data, ML or AI.

- At least 1 year of training experience for employees of government agencies, the corporate sector, educational organizations or students.

- Experience in conducting workshops, intensive courses, professional development programs or corporate training.

- The advantage will be: presentations at international conferences on AI/Data Science/ML/Big Data; availability of publications in international scientific journals or peer-reviewed publications in the fields of Data Science, ML or AI.

- Project support skills, project expert assessment and technical mentoring.

- Higher education in information technology, software engineering or related fields, or the availability of international professional certifications in the field of artificial intelligence and generative AI (Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI, DeepLearning.AI , Microsoft, AWS or similar).

- At least 5 years of commercial software development experience.

- Practical experience in using AI tools for software development (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Windsor, GitHub Copilot, Lovable, Bolt.new, Replit AI and others).

- Experience in developing web applications, SaaS products, REST API and integration of external services.

- Strong command of modern programming languages and frameworks (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, React, Next.js, Node.js or similar).

- Experience working with Git, GitHub, Docker, CI/CD and cloud platforms.

- Practical experience in the implementation of AI automation of business processes, the development of AI agents, AI Workflows and multi-agent systems.

- At least 1 year of experience in teaching AI, generative AI, and AI automation technologies to employees, civil servants, corporate clients, or students.

- Experience in conducting workshops, intensive courses, corporate training or educational programs on AI and Vibe Coding.

- Project team support skills, conducting code reviews and technical mentoring.

• Experience: From 1 to 3 years of work as a business assistant or personal assistant to top officials.
• Background: Work experience in the IT and financial sectors will be your great advantage.
• Languages: Fluent in English (Advanced/Fluent) and Russian (spoken and written) (business correspondence skills are required).
• Soft skills: High level of empathy, stress tolerance, 100% confidentiality, attention to detail and ability to work online

• Fluency and competent command of Russian and Kazakh languages (native speaker level)
• Confident PC user, high print speed
• The ability to express thoughts clearly, concisely and competently in writing
• High level of empathy and ability to find an approach to different types of clients
• Analytical mindset
• Responsible attitude to work, organization
• Attention to detail, ability to work with a large amount of information