Senior AI Backend Engineer

Job description

Version 1 has celebrated 30 years in business and continues to be trusted by global brands to deliver technology and transformation solutions that drive customer success. Our deep expertise enables our customers to navigate the rapidly evolving technology landscape. We foster strong partnerships with global technology leaders including Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, Red Hat, OutSystems, Snowflake, ensuring that our customers are provided with the highest quality solutions and services. We’re an award-winning employer reflecting how our employees are at the very heart of what we do: UK & Ireland's premier AWS, Microsoft & Oracle partner 3300+ strong, €350/£300m revenue business 10+ years as a Great Place to Work in Ireland & UK Best Workplace for Women in the UK & Ireland by GPTW Best Workplace for Wellbeing in the UK by GPTW We’re a core values driven company, we hire people who share our values, and we reward those who display and foster them, it’s deeply embedded within our DNA. Invest in us and we’ll invest in you. Role Overview Key Responsibilities Backend Engineering • Design, build, and maintain backend services and REST APIs that power customer products • Design data models and schemas, and work with relational and other data stores as appropriate • Apply strong software engineering and distributed systems principles to day-to-day development • Write automated tests and maintain CI/CD pipelines for reliable, repeatable deployments • Diagnose and resolve production issues related to latency, reliability, and data quality AI Integration • Integrate backend services with customer's AI Suite (Bedrock, AgentCore, SageMaker-based APIs) built and maintained by the AI Platform team • Wire LLM, embedding, and RAG-based capabilities exposed by the AI Suite into application features • Apply prompt engineering and function calling at the application level to build reliable AI-powered features • Contribute to testing and quality checks for AI-driven features from a product/application perspective Cross-Stack Contribution • Contribute across the stack as needed, such as data pipelines, infrastructure, or frontend touchpoints, depending on team and project needs • Partner with full stack engineers, the AI Platform team, and data teams to deliver features end-to-end • Balance delivery speed with code quality, maintainability, and operational health Collaboration & Growth • Work closely with product managers and business stakeholders to translate requirements into working software • Collaborate with the AI Platform team to stay current on AI Suite capabilities and best practices for consuming them • Share knowledge with other engineers on backend and AI-integration best practices Mandatory Technical Skills 7+ years of experience into Programming & Engineering • Python • REST API design and development • CI/CD pipelines • Automated testing • Distributed systems fundamentals • Relational database design (e.g. PostgreSQL) CI/CD & Infrastructure • Kubernetes • Terraform • Docker • Jenkins experience is a plus AI Familiarity • Working familiarity with Generative AI / LLM concepts: RAG, embeddings, prompt engineering, function calling • Experience integrating applications with LLM or AI platform APIs (e.g. AWS Bedrock or equivalent); deep agentic architecture or model training experience is not required • Comfortable reasoning about prompt behavior and AI output quality from an application/product perspective Cloud Platforms • Working experience with AWS (or equivalent cloud platform) • Exposure to core AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway, S3, and CloudWatch is a plus Data Platforms • Databricks experience is a plus Production & Operations • Observability (logs, metrics, tracing, alerts) • Monitoring and reliability engineering • Performance tuning and cost optimization Security • Experience implementing AuthN/AuthZ (OAuth2/OIDC, SSO), RBAC, and secrets management in production applications Soft Skills • Strong communication skills; comfortable presenting technical recommendations directly to engineering and business stakeholders Nice to Haves Domain • Experience working within the financial services domain is preferred • Prior experience across Capital Markets, Digital Assets/Crypto, or AI infrastructure is highly desirable • Awareness of the regulatory and compliance landscape relevant to financial services technology delivery AI & Product • Experience building applications on top of LLM/agentic AI platforms (e.g. AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, or equivalent) • Familiarity with vector databases and embeddings (e.g. pgvector) for AI-powered search/retrieval features • Ability to evaluate AI feature quality from a product/UX lens (accuracy, latency, hallucination handling, graceful degradation), distinct from model-level evaluation owned by the AI Platform team Why Version 1? At Version 1, we believe in providing our employees with a comprehensive benefits package that prioritises their wellbeing, professional growth, and financial stability. Share in our success with our Quarterly Performance-Related Profit Share Scheme, where employees collectively benefit from a share of our company's profits Strong Career Progression & mentorship coaching through our Strength in Balance & Leadership schemes with a dedicated quarterly Pathways Career Development programme Flexible/remote working, Version 1 is tremendously understanding of life events and people’s individual circumstances and offer flexibility to help achieve a healthy work life balance Financial Wellbeing initiatives including; Pension, Private Healthcare Cover, Life Assurance, Financial advice and an Employee Discount scheme Employee Wellbeing schemes including Gym Discounts, Bike to Work, Fitness classes, Mindfulness Workshops, Employee Assistance Programme and much more. Generous holiday allowance, enhanced maternity/paternity leave, marriage/civil partnership leave and special leave policies Educational assistance, incentivised certifications, and accreditations, including AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat Reward schemes including Version 1’s Annual Excellence Awards & ‘Call-Out’ platform. Environment, Social and Community First initiatives allow you to get involved in local fundraising and development opportunities as part of fostering our diversity, inclusion and belonging schemes. And many more exciting benefits… drop us a note to find out more. Version 1 is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to building a diverse, inclusive and respectful workplace where everyone feels valued and able to thrive. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and lived experiences, and we value the different perspectives people bring including those shaped by disability and neurodiversity. We want every candidate to have a positive and accessible recruitment experience. If you need reasonable adjustments at any stage of the process, please contact your recruiter at Version 1. We will consider all requests carefully, respectfully and confidentially. Video links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_d3ELTH5zo