Senior AI Engineer - Remote Eligible

Senior AI Engineer

Location: Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Remote

Team: Data

At Pleo, we're on a mission to revolutionize the way businesses manage company spending. No more outdated processes, clunky spreadsheets, or frustrating delays - we believe spend management should be seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike. We're creating tools that promote autonomy, foster trust, and let businesses focus on what truly matters.

Our culture is built on transparency, collaboration, and a deep commitment to innovation – which is reflected in our spending solution. At Pleo, you'll join a passionate team shaping the future of work, all while having some fun along the way.

About the Role

You will be the founding engineer of a brand new AI product team at Pleo. This is an exciting opportunity to shape the technical direction to build an exciting new product, with the support of fellow engineers to collaborate with. Pleo has over 40,000 customers and a decade of unique spend data—an incredible foundation to build upon. Your mission will be to harness this data. If you are a pragmatic, product-minded builder who thrives on solving complex problems and building systems from first principles, then this role is for you.

While part of the Data team and reporting directly into our Director of Data & Analytics (Product), you'll work directly embedded in the newly founded Spend Intelligence team alongside a Product Manager, Product Designer and as well as other engineers and data colleagues.

Your primary focus will be on building and shipping a new AI product from 0 to 1, with your core responsibilities centered on product architecture and model deployment, with a strong collaborative element for infrastructure.

What You'll Be Doing

• Architecting and building products from scratch. You will own the end-to-end development of AI-powered features, from initial design and model development to production deployment.
• Discovering and defining opportunities. You will proactively engage with teams across Pleo to uncover their most critical challenges and find the highest-impact opportunities for AI to solve them.
• Designing the "local first" operational stack. You will make the key technical decisions and build the infrastructure needed to power our AI features, within the guardrails of our architectural guidelines.
• Developing and deploying a range of ML models. You will productionise models to solve key customer problems.
• Integrating a portfolio of LLMs and APIs. You will connect our product to a diverse set of models and external tools to create powerful, automated systems.
• Collaboration with Platform teams. You will collaborate with the data platform team to input into our MLOps infrastructure, and also work closely with Engineering counterparts.
• Partnering to prove value. You will work in a tight, collaborative loop with our Product Manager, Data Engineers, Data Scientists & Analysts to deliver results.

In addition to this, you can expect to work with the following tech stack at Pleo:

• We're working with both AWS and GCP as well as Kubernetes as we have a hybrid infrastructure.
• Our data warehouse currently is in BigQuery, serving dbt and Looker, where we of course work with Python and SQL alongside airflow for orchestration and kafka for event-driven processing.
• Our product is built in Kotlin, Java, Node.js while leveraging PostgreSQL & MySQL.

What You Bring

We're looking for a doer who can translate complex business challenges and product visions into scalable AI solutions. You will thrive in this role if:

• You are a true "0-to-1" AI builder. You have proven experience taking a product from a concept to a production system.
• You are energized by greenfield projects and comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with them.
• You have a proven track record of shipping production-grade AI systems, with a focus on GenAI. You've successfully taken complex models to a live, scalable, and reliable production environment.
• You are a product-minded engineer. You care deeply about the "why" behind what you're building.
• You are pragmatic and results-oriented. You know how to make the right trade-offs to ship.
• You are a natural collaborator. You thrive in a cross-functional team environment.
• You are passionate about the fintech landscape. You are excited about solving complex financial problems for businesses.
• You have expertise in our technical environment. Your primary language will be Python alongside Kotlin and/or Java.

Why This Role Is a Good Fit for You

This role is for you if:

• You are an AI specialist first and a product engineer second - you have demonstrable examples of products you have built for customers.
• You are comfortable with rapid experimentation and evolving in ever-changing environments.
• You've taken both traditional AI and GenAI solutions to production and understand their unique DataOps, MLOps, LLMOps requirements.

This role may not be for you if:

• You want to focus on AI research and algorithm development. This role is focused on building!
• Spending time thinking deeply about architecture and infrastructure gives you nightmares.
• Supporting more traditional data professionals in upskilling is not something you enjoy.

The Package

The annual salary for this position varies based on your location:

• United Kingdom: £82,450 - £123,675
• European countries: €97,000 - €145,500

Please note we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role in any of the listed locations.

We're happy to share more about our approach to pay and this range during your first call with us!

Show Me the Benefits!

• 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
• Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far
• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work

The Interview Process

1. Intro call: A 30-minutes chat with our Talent Partner to discuss the role and your background.
2. Hiring Manager interview: a 60-minutes discussion with the hiring manager to dive deeper into your experience and our product/data vision.
3. A coding assessment: an exercise to complete at home or through a live session. Details will be provided by your Recruiter during the process.
4. A system design interview: a 75-minutes live session where you'll be expected to deliver a presentation on your experience designing, building and deploying an AI product.
5. A leadership interview: a 45-minutes discussion with a senior leader focusing on behavioral skills and values.

Transparency is important to us so we also wanted to share some insights about what we're looking for in applications to ensure you can set yourself up for success!

This is our first time hiring an AI Engineer at Pleo and considering the level of "hype" on the market for such a new role, we're expecting a really high volume of applicants. The key things we will be looking for while screening applications include:

• CV writing and content: it is very clear that many of the CVs we see are very generic and highlighting buzzwords. We want to see clear indications of what real impact the candidates had in their previous experiences. You might have heard of the "Achieved X, as measured