AI Software Engineer

The opportunity Northreach is partnering with a growing technology business to appoint an AI Software Engineer. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building reliable AI-powered products and intelligent workflows. You will work across software engineering, backend development and applied AI, turning early ideas into secure, scalable applications used by customers and internal teams. You will take ownership throughout the development lifecycle—from discovery and prototyping through to deployment, monitoring and continuous improvement. This role would suit an engineer who enjoys experimenting with modern AI technology but also understands the discipline required to operate dependable software in production. What you’ll be doing * Design and build production-ready applications powered by large language models. * Develop AI agents and multi-stage workflows capable of using tools, retrieving information and completing defined tasks. * Build retrieval-augmented generation systems using structured and unstructured business data. * Integrate AI capabilities with internal platforms, databases, APIs and third-party services. * Create scalable backend services and APIs using Python or a comparable language. * Evaluate different models, prompts and approaches based on accuracy, latency, reliability and cost. * Build safeguards, approval stages and human-in-the-loop controls for sensitive workflows. * Improve the quality of AI outputs through testing, evaluation frameworks and monitoring. * Deploy and maintain AI services within a cloud environment. * Diagnose production issues and improve system performance, security and observability. * Collaborate with product, engineering and commercial stakeholders to identify valuable applications for AI. * Contribute to technical architecture, development standards and the wider AI roadmap. About you You will ideally bring: * Strong commercial software-engineering experience, particularly in backend or full-stack development. * Proficiency in Python and experience building production APIs or distributed services. * Practical experience developing applications using large language models. * Knowledge of agent frameworks or orchestration tools such as LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel or similar. * Experience building RAG systems using embeddings, vector databases and semantic search. * Understanding of tool calling, structured outputs, memory, state management and multi-step AI workflows. * Experience integrating applications with databases, internal systems and third-party APIs. * Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. * Experience with testing, deployment, monitoring and maintaining production software. * A strong understanding of software architecture, security and data privacy. * The ability to translate ambiguous business problems into practical technical solutions. Experience with some of the following would also be valuable: * TypeScript, Node.js, React or modern frontend technologies. * Docker, Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code. * Model evaluation, tracing and LLM observability tools. * Fine-tuning, open-source models or model-serving infrastructure. * Event-driven systems and asynchronous processing. * Experience working in fintech, financial services or another regulated environment. You do not need experience with every tool listed. The business is particularly interested in engineers who combine strong software-engineering fundamentals with curiosity, sound judgement and genuine hands-on experience building with AI. What’s on offer * Competitive salary and benefits package. * Hybrid and flexible working. * Significant ownership of technically challenging AI products. * The opportunity to influence the company’s AI engineering direction. * A collaborative environment with access to senior technical and commercial stakeholders. * Support for continued learning and professional development.