Principal Software Engineer- AI Lead

Ocho; Belfast City District; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work in Belfast

2 days per week in Belfast office

Access to Copilot and multiple LLMs

Strategic AI leadership exposure

Job summary

Ocho is seeking a Principal Software Engineer - AI Engineering Lead in Belfast, offering a hybrid model with 2 days in the office. You will shape how a global engineering organisation builds software with AI, leading without management duties.

You will work across Belfast and the US, turning bold ideas into tangible, scalable solutions. You will embed AI into CI/CD, establish metrics, and coach engineers to adopt AI-first ways while maintaining high quality.

Qualifications

• 10-15 years of hands-on software engineering experience.
• Recent AI-focused commercial experience leading adoption, not just usage.
• End-to-end SDLC knowledge from planning to CI/CD and production.
• Ability to communicate with engineers, Architects, PMs and senior leaders.
• Based in Northern Ireland with Belfast office availability 2 days a week.

Responsibilities

• Shape and lead the AI engineering strategy across a multi-team platform organisation.
• Cut through the volume of AI activity and decide what is genuinely worth adopting.
• Build reusable skills, agents and workflows that engineers can use straight away.
• Run tiger teams with architects, product managers and SMEs to deliver high-value AI use cases.
• Embed AI into CI/CD, testing and release engineering safely and with care.
• Set baseline engineering efficiency metrics and show the impact of every change.
• Champion responsible AI, including security, data protection, governance and human oversight.
• Coach engineers to adopt AI-first ways of working without lowering the quality bar.
• Influence directors and US stakeholders, turning strategy into practical delivery.

Skills

Hands-on software engineering

Experience with AI adoption

Fluency with AI tools

Communication with senior leaders

DORA-style metrics experience

Tools

Copilot

Claude Code

Cursor

LLM frameworks

Job description

Principal Software Engineer - AI Engineering Lead | Belfast | Hybrid

• Principal-level technical leadership... real influence, no line management
• Hybrid: 2 days a week in Belfast
• Any modern stack welcome... Java, .NET, Python, Go and beyond
• Define how a global engineering organisation builds software with AI
• Exclusive to Ocho People... you won't see this role advertised anywhere else

About the Company

Our client is one of the world's largest financial technology businesses, and it has just had a transformational year. A major acquisition has more than doubled its scale, and it now supports millions of businesses and tens of billions of transactions a year across more than 175 countries. It plans to invest more than a billion dollars a year in innovation. Belfast is one of its key engineering hubs, and the work done here runs on platforms that people all over the world rely on every single day.

The Role

Most companies talk about AI. This one is ready to act on it... and they need the right person to lead the way.

There is already huge energy around AI here. There are AI communities, innovation days, shared repos and teams experimenting with new tools. What's missing is someone with the engineering credibility to cut through the noise, decide what's worth adopting, and build it into how software is actually designed, tested and shipped.

That's you. You'll work across multiple engineering teams in Belfast and the US, partnering with a highly technical senior leader who wants big, measurable gains and needs someone to turn bold ideas into things that work. This is about helping great engineers do their best work faster and with less friction. It's not about cutting jobs.

You won't manage people, but you will lead. You'll be the person teams turn to when they want to know what good AI-assisted engineering looks like.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape and lead the AI engineering strategy across a multi-team platform organisation
• Cut through the volume of AI activity and decide what is genuinely worth adopting
• Build reusable skills, agents and workflows that engineers can use straight away
• Run focused tiger teams with architects, product managers and subject matter experts to deliver high-value AI use cases
• Embed AI into CI/CD, testing and release engineering safely and with care
• Set baseline engineering efficiency metrics and show the impact of every change
• Champion responsible AI, including security, data protection, governance and human oversight
• Coach engineers to adopt AI-first ways of working without lowering the quality bar
• Influence directors and US stakeholders, turning strategy into practical delivery

What You'll Need

• 10-15 years of hands-on software engineering, and you still love being close to the code
• Recent commercial experience in a company that has gone all in on AI... you have driven adoption, not just used the tools
• Fluency with modern AI engineering tools and concepts such as Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, agents, MCP and prompt and context engineering
• An end-to-end view of the SDLC, from planning and design through to CI/CD and production
• A careful, quality-first mindset... you know that some systems simply can't break
• Confident communication with engineers, architects, product people and senior leaders
• Based in Northern Ireland and able to be in the Belfast office 2 days a week
• Experience in financial services or another highly regulated industry
• Hands-on work with LLM frameworks, RAG or evaluation tooling
• Experience putting developer productivity or DORA-style metrics in place

Why Apply?

• Hybrid working with just 2 days a week in the Belfast office
• A rare principal role where you lead the AI agenda for a global engineering organisation
• Direct backing from senior leadership who want real change, not another pilot
• Access to Copilot and multiple LLMs, with the freedom to experiment and scale what works
• Your work will touch platforms used by millions of businesses worldwide
• A straightforward process: an informal chat with senior leadership, then a strategy-focused conversation with a director and an AI specialist... no coding test
• They're moving quickly, so you could be in the seat within weeks, not months