AI Engineer & Researcher · Saudi Arabia

Ruqiya Bin Safi

رقيا بن صافي

token activations · what I work on hover a word

I build production LLM systems, study what happens inside them, and make them work in Arabic.

I built the AI search engine at Fyler from its first architecture to product ownership. Now I do AI safety research in mechanistic interpretability with EleutherAI. I am a 2× Google Developer Expert and I have spent years teaching AI in Arabic.

LinkedIn GitHub Hugging Face Kaggle Medium X

2026

Now

Jul 2026 – now

EleutherAI · SOAR 2026 active

Selected from 3,500+ applicants for the SOAR 2026 research program (July – August 2026), and still working with the team on hierarchy recovery in sparse autoencoders.

Jan – Jun 2026

Algoverse · AI Safety Research Fellow

One of 30 fellows selected worldwide. Circuit tracing of refusal and jailbreak behaviour in Gemma 3.

2024 – 2026

MBA in Artificial Intelligence · Walbrook Institute London

Selected

Work

Papers, models and libraries, most of them for Arabic.

Paper · ICLR 2025

MMTEB

Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark. I am a co-author and contributed Arabic evaluation data.

arxiv.org/abs/2502.13595 Model · Demo

RuqLM

A family of small Arabic language models, from 3M to 30M parameters, with public weights.

ruqlm.web.app Library · PyPI

ruqia

Arabic text cleaning, normalization and diacritics. Used for the MMTEB Arabic work.

pip install ruqia App · PaLM 2

ChatBard

One of the first Arabic apps on PaLM 2. Featured by Google Cloud Tech, with 49 stars on GitHub.

github.com/Ruqyai/ChatBard Models · Fine-tuning

Gemma 2 for Arabic

Gemma 2 2B and 9B fine-tuned on Arabic data with LoRA, trained across 8 GPUs.

huggingface.co/Ruqiya Agents · Google ADK

Marketing agents

Agents that write and post LinkedIn content and talk to each other over A2A, running on Gemini 3 Pro.

github.com/Ruqyai

2017 – 2026

Experience

2023 – 2026

Fyler · GenAI search engine for MENA

Joined as an early engineer. Designed the RAG pipeline behind the core search product, then led the product and the team.

AI EngineerSep 2023
Senior AI EngineerFeb 2024
Head of Saudi ArabiaNov 2024
AI Product ManagerNov 2025

2021 – 2022

Success Partners · Founder & CEO

Founded a technical-events startup and ran teams of 45+ people delivering hackathons and developer programs.

2020 – 2022

Bayan · R&D, Data Science & AI

Arabic social network and sentiment analysis, including Hajj 2021 and COVID-19 studies.

2017 – 2022

Consulting, teaching & freelance

ML consultant at Techie Bits, AI instructor at Code for Girls, freelance ML engineer, and intern then mentor at Classera.

Community

Recognition

2× Google Developer ExpertAI and Google Cloud, since 2020

Google Cloud Champion InnovatorAlso a member of the Google GenAI Circle

TensorFlow Contributor Award 2021Middle East & Africa · TensorFlow blog

International speakerTalks for developer communities in Nigeria, Algeria, Türkiye, Brazil, the USA, Canada, Poland, the UK and Guinea

Mentor, Google for Startups Accelerator MENA50+ startups mentored

Community builderFounded, led and grew tech communities for developers and for women in tech in Saudi Arabia for five years (2019 – 2024), as an organizer, trainer and mentor

Speaker, trainer and judgeRecognized by 39 organizations, including STC Academy, Tuwaiq Academy, KFUPM and King Saud University · 61 certificates

Hajj Hackathon 2018Part of the Guinness World Record for the largest hackathon

Blog