Senior/Lead AI Back End Software En...

We are seeking a Senior/Lead AI Back End Software Engineer to establish quality standards for AI/LLM features, including evaluation, red-teaming, prompt/versioning, and regression tests, ensuring production readiness. This role involves designing and executing proof-of-concepts (POCs) to validate approaches end-to-end, incorporating hypotheses, success metrics, evaluation, and cost/latency assessments, with the goal of driving learnings into production-ready, performant, and cost-optimized solutions. You will own and evolve the AI/Search architecture roadmap in collaboration with Domain and Group Architecture, balancing customer impact, security, compliance, and cost.

Key responsibilities include leading solution design workshops, producing clear technical proposals with NFRs, risks, and migration/rollout plans. You will define, document, and champion best practices in architecture, coding standards, DevSecOps/LLMOps, and observability, leading by example through hands-on delivery and reviews. Mentoring engineers, providing technical guidance, and fostering a high-performing, inclusive engineering culture are also crucial aspects of this position.

The ideal candidate possesses deep proficiency in Java or Kotlin and their ecosystems, with proven experience designing and operating large-scale backend systems in production. Strong experience with Micronaut or SpringBoot, Terraform, and designing cloud-native microservices, including reliability patterns, performance tuning, and cost optimization, is required. Significant knowledge of Python with AI & ML focused tools is essential. You must have a proven track record of delivering AI/LLM capabilities end-to-end in production (RAG, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring), with hands-on experience with AWS Bedrock, including Guardrails and safe rollout patterns. A strong applied understanding of ML/AI concepts (embeddings, retrieval, evaluation, privacy/safety considerations) is necessary for making pragmatic architecture trade-offs. Expertise in data preparation and prompt engineering, focusing on repeatability (versioning), automated evaluation, and measurable outcomes, is highly valued. Experience with OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, relevance tuning, and operating search at scale, along with implementing resource-oriented APIs (REST, GraphQL) on both client and server sides, is beneficial.

Senior-level cloud architecture expertise on AWS (networking, security, IAM, observability, reliability) and infrastructure as code are expected, with the ability to define standards and reference implementations. Demonstrated technical leadership, including mentoring, driving cross-team alignment, and communicating complex topics to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders, is a must. Experience with data persistence (SQL/noSQL), creating microservices, and good experience with CI/CD, preferably Gitlab CI, are also important. You should be able to design, build, test, and deploy applications, be customer-centric, passionate about delivering great digital products and services, and demonstrate a true software craftsmanship mindset. A passion for continuous improvement, collaboration, and great teams, coupled with strong problem-solving skills and good communication, is essential. Understanding of social and ethical implications of software engineering, being open-minded, inquisitive, a life-long learner, and comfortable with ambiguity and high autonomy are key attributes for success in this role.