Senior Arabic NLP Research Scientist

Role overview

Pantheion AI is training Pantheion-1 — the world's first sovereign Arabic/English frontier large language model — on classified GCC data, with dialect awareness and Constitutional AI governance designed for the MENA cultural and regulatory context. As a Senior Arabic NLP Research Scientist, you will be at the core of this effort: researching, designing, and implementing the language model capabilities that make Pantheion-1 genuinely frontier-grade in Arabic. This is a rare opportunity to do meaningful research on an under-served language with real-world sovereign impact.

What you will do

• Lead Arabic language capability research for Pantheion-1 — developing novel approaches to dialect-aware language modelling across Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, and Modern Standard Arabic
• Design and execute pre-training data curation pipelines for Arabic: sourcing, filtering, cleaning, and annotating sovereign GCC datasets at billion-token scale
• Research and implement Arabic-specific tokenization, morphological processing, and vocabulary design that improves model performance across Arabic dialects
• Develop Arabic language benchmarks for model evaluation — both adapting existing benchmarks and creating novel evaluations for GCC-specific language tasks
• Contribute to the Constitutional AI adaptation for Arabic cultural, religious, and GCC regulatory contexts — ensuring model outputs align with Islamic ethical guidelines and regional compliance requirements
• Collaborate with the infrastructure team to optimize Arabic language training efficiency on Pantheion's sovereign compute stack
• Publish research findings at top NLP venues (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL) where appropriate, building Pantheion AI's international research profile
• Engage with the Arabic developer community and academic partners to build Pantheion AI's research ecosystem

Skills profile

Required qualifications

Preferred qualifications