AI Platform Engineer - Agentic Interfaces

IFS; Staines-upon-Thames; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

IFS is seeking engineers to build AI-native enterprise software that lets AI agents operate safely inside our platform. You will design MCP servers, semantic layers, and control planes, while ensuring security, observability, and governance across distributed systems.

Responsibilities span building robust data models, evaluation harnesses, and rapid prototypes to validate emerging technology and customer opportunities, with a focus on enterprise-scale solutions.

Qualifications

• Production experience building and operating enterprise systems with distributed systems and cloud-native architectures.
• Strong backend programming skills and API design experience.
• Experience delivering AI systems built on LLMs, RAG, and agentic workflows.
• Knowledge of security, observability, CI/CD and governance in production systems.
• Experience with evaluation, benchmarking, prompt engineering and agent tuning.
• Ability to integrate enterprise applications, business processes and data platforms.

Responsibilities

• Design and build MCP servers (Model Context Protocol) over product objects with versioning and backward compatibility.
• Develop the safe write path for agents to modify customer data.
• Create the semantic layer: ontology and knowledge graph across the product.
• Develop skills layer mapping requests to operations with routing.
• Build the control plane: authentication, entitlements, telemetry, and secure defaults.
• Create evaluation harness to certify agent behavior against the product.
• Prototype rapidly to validate technology opportunities and customer scenarios.
• Establish engineering practices: testing, observability, governance and reliability.
• Contribute to technical design and peer reviews.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud-native architectures

API design

Security

CI/CD

Backend programming

AI systems (LLMs)

Agent frameworks

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Oracle PL/SQL

OData

Job description

Company Description

At IFS, we're building the next generation of AI-native enterprise software, transforming how some of the world's largest organisations manage assets, operations and critical services.

This is an opportunity to work at the forefront of modern AI engineering, building intelligent products that combine Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic AI and cloud-native technologies to solve complex, real-world business challenges at enterprise scale.

We're looking for engineers who are passionate about building production AI systems and excited by the opportunity to shape the future of enterprise software.

Please note that this role requires demonstrable, hands-on experience designing, building and shipping production AI applications.

IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. We deliver award-winning enterprise software solutions through the use of embedded digital innovation and a single cloud-based platform to help businesses be their best when it really matters - at the Moment of Service.

At IFS, we're flexible, we're innovative, and we're focused not only on how we can engage with our customers, but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society's greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.

We celebrate diversity and accept that there are so many different perspectives in this world. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.

By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.

We're looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs.

If you want to change the status quo, we'll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.

Job Description

Build and operate the interface, semantic layer and controls that let AI agents work inside IFS software safely.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build MCP servers (Model Context Protocol, the emerging standard for exposing application capability to agents) over the product’s business objects, treating capability modelling, discoverability, versioning and backward compatibility as first-class design problems.

• Build the write path that lets an agent safely change a customer’s operational data.

• Build the semantic layer: an ontology and knowledge graph over the product, generated from what the platform already knows about itself and then curated industry by industry.

• Build the skills layer that maps what someone asks for onto the correct operation and the correct sequence, with a router that picks between them.

• Build the control plane: authentication, entitlements, agent identity, telemetry, metering, resistance to injection, and a default that denies rather than permits.

• Build the evaluation harness that certifies agent behaviour against the real product, and improve the system against what it measures.

• Build rapid prototypes and proofs of concept to validate emerging technology, product opportunities and customer scenarios.

• Establish the engineering practices these systems need: evaluation, testing, observability, monitoring, governance, security and operational excellence.

• Contribute to technical design, review other engineers’ work, and support colleagues coming into the domain.

• Represent the work outside the team through customer engagements, demonstrations, industry events and partner collaboration.

Qualifications

Strong software engineering first. Everything else is applied on top of that.

• Production experience building and operating enterprise systems, with real depth in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, API and schema design, event-driven systems, security, observability and CI/CD.

• Strong programming in a modern backend language. See the note on language under "Open calls" before advertising.

• Experience delivering AI systems built on large language models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows and orchestration frameworks, including tool use, function calling, workflow orchestration and autonomous or multi-agent architectures, with the judgement to know where they fail.

• Evaluation as a discipline: experimentation, benchmarking, prompt engineering, tracing, quality measurement and agent tuning, improving an agent against evidence rather than impression.

• Ability to design solutions that integrate enterprise applications, business processes, workflows and data platforms.

• Depth in at least one of the following:

• Tool-surface and agent-runtime engineering. MCP servers, tool ecosystems, capability modelling, discoverability, governance, versioning, backward compatibility, multi-tenancy isolation.

• Knowledge graphs and semantic modelling. Ontology design, context engineering, embeddings, vector databases, retrieval and search technologies, memory architectures, grounding strategies.

• Enterprise platform depth. Oracle PL/SQL, OData, and comfort working inside large metadata-driven systems where behaviour is configured rather than coded.

Desirable

• Experience with agent frameworks such as Semantic Kernel, Microsoft Agent Framework, LangGraph, AutoGen, PydanticAI, the OpenAI Agents SDK or CrewAI.

• Experience building reusable AI platforms, MCP ecosystems or shared engineering capabilities used across multiple products and teams.

• Containerised platforms and infrastructure automation: Docker, Kubernetes.

• Experience with Azure, AWS, GCP or another hyperscale cloud platform.

• Reverse-engineering or interpreter work.

• Token-efficient agent design.

• Enterprise software domains: enterprise asset management, service management, manufacturing, supply chain, aerospace and defence, energy, telecommunications, construction, industrial AI.

• Contributions to open-source projects, technical communities, conferences, publications or standards.

Additional Information

We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.