Software Engineer AI

Spendesk; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 30,000 - 32,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible hybrid work policy

Latest Apple equipment

Health insurance

Wellness allowances

Commuter support

Meal vouchers

Job summary

Spendesk is seeking a senior backend engineer to design, build, and operate APIs powering conversational and agentic AI features. You will implement context management, tool invocation, and multi-step orchestration while ensuring production-ready reliability and security.

You will collaborate with Staff Engineers to shape architecture, integrate LLMs with central services, and harden experiments into durable production systems. Strong emphasis on scalable patterns and data-driven decisions.

Qualifications

• Significant backend software engineering experience in production environments.
• Strong track record of designing and shipping scalable backend services with ownership of reliability and maintainability.
• Experience contributing to complex technical projects in fast-paced product organizations.
• Hands-on exposure to AI-enabled or LLM-backed product features in production preferred.
• Strong backend engineering skills with TypeScript / Node.js or adjacent technologies.
• Fluency in service design, asynchronous architectures, and resilient distributed systems.
• Experience integrating APIs and external services into robust product backends.
• Practical experience or strong interest in integrating LLMs into production systems, ideally using AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
• Familiarity with Kafka, PostgreSQL, and modern observability practices.
• Autonomy and ability to own ambiguous technical problems from framing to delivery.
• Ability to collaborate with Staff Engineer while delivering complex components.
• Product-minded, customer-focused and capable of translating business needs into backend systems.
• Curiosity about AI-native product design and durable foundations.
• Fluent written and spoken English.
• Experience with conversational or agentic systems is a plus.
• Experience integrating LLMs with tool-calling, guardrails, and evaluation loops is a plus.
• Experience with rich content processing, document workflows, or multimodal service design is a plus.
• Experience in SaaS, fintech, or regulated environments is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services and APIs powering conversational and agentic AI features.
• Implement services for context management, tool invocation, rich content access, and multi-step orchestration.
• Build robust patterns for integrating LLMs through AWS Bedrock, including retries, fallbacks, tracing, and cost-aware usage.
• Ensure production-ready services with strong reliability, maintainability, and security standards.
• Collaborate with the IC5 Staff Engineer to implement the architecture supporting AI-native experiences.
• Contribute to reusable service boundaries, contracts, and interfaces across squads.
• Define how applicative squads expose MCP-compatible tools to central AI services.
• Translate architectural direction into concrete implementations and scalable patterns.
• Own complex backend components end-to-end from design to deployment and maintenance.
• Contribute to proofs-of-concept, then harden successful ones into reliable production services.
• Review code, challenge design decisions, and raise backend quality.
• Deliver pragmatically, balancing experimentation speed with platform quality.
• Instrument services with logs, tracing, and metrics for production visibility.
• Uphold quality around latency, failure handling, cost efficiency, and resilience.
• Foster a build-it-and-run-it culture where engineers own production.

Skills

Backend engineering

TypeScript/Node.js

AWS Bedrock / LLM integration

API design & integration

Observability & reliability

Async architectures

Team collaboration

English communication

Tools

Kafka

PostgreSQL

Redis

SQS

Step Functions

Job description

Salary: £30,000 - 32,000 per year

Requirements:

• Significant backend software engineering experience in production environments.
• A strong track record of designing and shipping scalable backend services with clear ownership of reliability and maintainability.
• Experience contributing to complex technical projects in fast-paced product organizations.
• Hands-on exposure to AI-enabled or LLM-backed product features in production is preferred.
• Strong backend engineering skills with TypeScript / Node.js or adjacent technologies.
• Good fluency in service design, asynchronous architectures, and resilient distributed systems.
• Experience integrating APIs and external services into robust product backends.
• Practical experience or strong interest in integrating LLMs into production systems, ideally using platforms such as AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
• Familiarity with technologies such as Kafka, SQS, Step Functions, PostgreSQL, and modern observability practices.
• Highly autonomous and comfortable owning ambiguous technical problems from framing to delivery.
• Able to work effectively in partnership with a Staff Engineer while independently delivering complex components.
• Product-minded, customer-focused, and capable of translating business needs into backend systems.
• Curious about AI-native product design and motivated by building durable foundations, not just short-term demos.
• Fluent in written and spoken English, our business language.
• Experience with conversational or agentic systems is a plus.
• Experience integrating LLMs with tool-calling, guardrails, and evaluation loops is a plus.
• Experience with rich content processing, document workflows, or multimodal service design is a plus.
• Experience in SaaS, fintech, or regulated environments is a plus.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate backend services and APIs that power conversational and agentic AI features.
• Implement services for context management, tool invocation, rich content access, and multi-step orchestration.
• Build robust patterns for integrating LLMs through AWS Bedrock, including retries, fallbacks, tracing, and cost-aware usage.
• Ensure services are production-ready from day one, with strong standards on reliability, maintainability, and security.
• Partner with the IC5 Staff Engineer to implement the architecture supporting AI-native product experiences.
• Contribute to reusable service boundaries, contracts, and interfaces that can be adopted across squads.
• Help define how applicative squads can expose MCP-compatible tools and capabilities to central AI services.
• Translate high-level architectural direction into concrete technical implementations and scalable engineering patterns.
• Own complex backend components end-to-end, from design and implementation to deployment and maintenance.
• Contribute directly to proof-of-concepts and experiments, then harden the successful ones into reliable production services.
• Review code, challenge design decisions, and raise the quality bar on backend engineering within the squad.
• Bring pragmatism to delivery, balancing speed of experimentation with long-term platform quality.
• Instrument services with logs, tracing, and metrics to ensure strong production visibility and fast iteration.
• Help define and uphold quality standards around latency, failure handling, cost efficiency, and resilience.
• Contribute to a strong you build it, you run it culture, where backend engineers own what they ship in production.
• Ensure AI-related services are built with secure coding and responsible data handling practices.
• Collaborate with Product Managers and Designers to turn AI product concepts into concrete backend capabilities.
• Partner with applicative squads to connect backend services with the tools, context, and business actions needed by AI systems.
• Help create shared engineering knowledge around LLM integration, async workflows, and reliable AI feature delivery.

Technologies:

• Agentic AI
• AI
• AWS
• Backend
• Support
• Kafka
• LLM
• MCP
• PostgreSQL
• Security
• TypeScript
• NodeJS
• Cloud
• Exposed
• Redis

More:

We are Spendesk, the AI-powered spend management and procurement platform that transforms company spending. We simplify procurement, payment cards, expense management, invoice processing, and accounting automation, giving finance leaders visibility and control across company spend, including multi-entity structures. We support over 200,000 users across brands such as SoundCloud, Gousto, SumUp, and Bloom & Wild, and we have offices in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Germany. We value regular in-person collaboration and are primarily hiring in Paris, London, or Barcelona with a flexible hybrid setup; outstanding remote candidates may also be considered. Our team works in an AI-first, product-led, collaborative, and pragmatic environment, and we offer benefits such as flexible on-site and remote policy, latest Apple equipment, access to Moka.care, great office snacks, and location-specific benefits including health insurance, wellness allowances, commuter support, meal vouchers, and gym memberships. We are committed to diversity, inclusion, and building a culture where everyone feels welcome.

last updated 36 week of 2026