Saudi AI Jobs & Talent

KAUST — Thuwal

Founded 2009 as a graduate research university. It runs four Centers of Excellence, among them Generative AI, chaired by Prof. Bernard Ghanem and co-chaired by Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber.

KFUPM — Dhahran

Home to JRC-AI, the joint AI research centre with SDAIA established in January 2022. It offers a Master of Artificial Intelligence, and runs the SDAIA/KFUPM “AI Pioneers Initiative” launched in August 2024.

KSU — Riyadh

Founded in 1957, the Kingdom's first university. Its College of Computer and Information Sciences offers an MSc in AI.

KAU — Jeddah

Founded in 1967. Its Faculty of Computing and IT became a full Faculty by royal decree in 2006, with departments in computer science, information systems, information technology and cybersecurity.

PSU — Riyadh

Offers an AI and Data Science track, PhDs in AI, Data Science and Cybersecurity, and runs the AIDA Lab.

Tuwaiq Academy launched in 2019, affiliated with SAFCSP and based at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University in Riyadh. It runs bootcamps in web and mobile programming, cybersecurity, cloud and game programming, and states a target of qualifying 100,000 programmers by 2030. Ten global technology companies operate academies there, among them Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, IBM and Cisco.

SDAIA Academy runs data and AI bootcamps. SAMAI — “One Million Saudis in AI” — launched at GAIN in September 2024 with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development. SDAIA's Year of AI dashboard cites more than 3.6 million SAMAI and SDAIA Talks beneficiaries, and more than 80,300 technology graduates between 2020 and 2025.

Saudization is administered by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development. Nitaqat, introduced in 2011, classifies private-sector establishments by their ratio of Saudi nationals. HRSD has confirmed an upgraded programme and a 2026 phase targeting more than 340,000 additional localized jobs.

On the ICT sector specifically:

• An October 2020 decision to localize communications and IT professions in establishments with five or more workers, covering around 9,000 jobs, with minimum wages of SAR 7,000 per month for specialized roles and SAR 5,000 per month for technical roles.
• 25% Saudization for communications and IT took effect on 27 June 2021, applied across engineering, application development, programming and analysis, and technical support.
• Engineering professions were raised to 30%, phased from 27 July 2025 under Ministerial Resolution 103105.

Compensation on KSA.ai is community-reported rather than modelled: anonymous salary submissions by role, seniority, city and company. That is the honest way to see what a role actually pays here, and it improves every time someone adds a data point.