pleo - Staff Applied AI Engineer

United Kingdom - Hybrid3mo ago

In Office Staff EMEA Cloud Computing Artificial Intelligence AI Engineer HR Manager Vector Change Management SQL Python GCP

Requirements

• You will thrive in this role if you have: • Proven experience shipping multiple GenAI features into production, at scale in a customer-facing product. You've moved past prototype phases and ideally have experience shipping multi-step, tool-using agents in a user-facing product. • The ability to translate complex business challenges and product visions into scalable AI solutions. In other words, you can autonomously scope, design and build. • Deep applied AI judgment: you can reason about evaluation, retrieval quality, tool use, failure modes, and what is/isn’t worth building. • Experience applying evaluation and observability to LLM systems (tests, golden sets, online metrics, monitoring) and using those signals to iterate. • Strong understanding of privacy and security concerns when building LLM applications: prompt injection, handling PII and data leakage risk. • Solid experience with the modern AI stack including Vector DBs, orchestration and durable execution frameworks, and LLM APIs. • Experience building APIs, services and data retrieval pipelines (RAG, vector search etc) to feed data into LLMs. • Deep proficiency with Python for both data and ML engineering, SQL and major cloud providers. • An extensive background in traditional ML engineering and a deep understanding of how to architect and build data systems for reliable and scalable production-use. • Ability to influence cross-functionally with Product/Design/Engineering and bring teams along on decisions. • To share extra context, our current tech stack includes GCP, BigQuery, Airflow, Python, SQL on the Data side and AWS, Kotlin, Javascript, Typescript on the Product side while our infrastructure is containerised with Kubernetes. Experience across those technologies or languages would be considered a bonus. • Technical screening: A 15 to 30 minute call with our Talent Partner to check your knowledge of key technical topics • System design interview: A 75-minute practical session with our engineers focusing on scoping and designing an AI feature • Live coding interview: A 75-minute practical session with our engineers focusing on implementing your solution. • Hiring Manager interview: A 60-minute conversation to deep dive into your knowledge and experience. • Final interview: A leadership interview focusing on your behavioural, communication and collaboration skills. • Application care: every single application we receive is reviewed by a human (yes, hundreds of them) because we believe that candidates' efforts should be matched by an equal level of human care. This means that we expect a similar level of attention put into your application. Read and answer the application questions carefully, they make a huge difference in our decision-making process.

Responsibilities

• As a Staff Applied AI Engineer you will: • Build and ship multiple AI-powered product features, setting the bar for delivery at Pleo, across agentic workflows, spend intelligence, automated actions, and more. • Bring deep applied AI expertise and strong judgment on trade-offs (quality vs latency/cost, build vs buy, agent patterns vs simpler approaches) and help teams avoid hype-driven decisions. • Work directly with Product, Design, Engineering, and business stakeholders to advise and prioritise on what's actually worth building. You aren't just implementing specs, you're discovering and defining the product. • Own the evaluation, monitoring, and operationalisation of AI features: setting up evals, tracking drift and performance, and managing prompt changes safely in production. You will help establish how Pleo does this at scale and own the development in production. • Act as a design partner to the GenAI Core platform team: challenge decisions with evidence from real feature delivery, bring clear requirements, and validate platform choices in production. • Establish and enforce practical standards for AI feature delivery in product squads (evaluation strategy, monitoring expectations, safe prompt/versioning practices, privacy & safety guardrails) using GenAI Platform tooling (not building the platform itself). • Upskill the team through mentorship, reviews, pairing, and lightweight playbooks that make other engineers faster. • Familiarise yourself with our codebase, tooling and roadmap. • Partner with our Principal Engineer to define and own our approach to AI feature development. • Contribute to shaping the roadmap for tooling and features developed by our GenAI Core team. • Collaborate with Product and Data teams to ship a first feature to production • We’re committed to helping you develop your career, whether that means taking on bigger projects, stepping into leadership, or acquiring new skills! • Please note: We can hire on a remote, hybrid or in-person set-up in any of the locations listed on the advert but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work. • We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Benefits

• This role is a good fit for you if: • You are a software engineer with product instincts. You build with the user in mind. You understand that a model is only as good as the problem it solves. • You have moved pas prototyping and have a deep understanding of the realities of LLMOps, data retrieval, prompt and context engineering, as well as model evaluation in production. • You don't just call APIs, you understand the data feeding the AI system and can reason about data quality, architecture, and retrieval without needing a dedicated data engineer beside you at all times. • This role is not a good fit for you if: • You want to focus on research and algorithm development. We need someone who cares about shipping solutions to production right now, turning AI concepts into functional features that solve real financial problems today. • You need a perfectly groomed backlog, structured tooling and pre-defined specs. We expect our Staff Engineers to be able to navigate ambiguity, to autonomously scope solutions and build any new tooling that might be required. • You can't explain complex AI trade-offs to a CEO or a designer without losing them in the weeds. You work well with stakeholders who are very technically or commercially focused. • Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!) • Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office • Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis • We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays • For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options • We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far • THE INTERVIEW PROCESS • We want to ensure you are set-up for success and understand what will be expected of you. If your application is successful, our interview process is as follows: