Staff AI Engineer

Plum; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Private health insurance

Annual training budget

25 days holiday

Flexible remote working

Office in London

Job summary

Plum is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to own the AI Platform and Wealth Advisor teams, shaping the scalability, safety and reliability of AI-driven financial guidance for millions. You’ll lead model orchestration, retrieval, and guardrails, working with product, data science and compliance to unlock growth while maintaining regulatory standards.

The role demands senior technical leadership, hands-on Python and cloud experience, and the ability to translate business goals into robust AI

Qualifications

• Proven track record of leading teams delivering LLM-powered systems in production.
• Experience designing, shipping and operating AI platforms at scale.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect core components of the AI platform and enable cross-team adoption.
• Lead end-to-end development of LLM-powered experiences for the Wealth Advisor product.
• Build evaluation systems and guardrails to ensure safe, reliable AI.
• Define governance, observability, cost and latency monitoring for AI systems.
• Drive strategic AI roadmap and evaluate new models and tools.
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar on AI engineering craft.

Skills

Technical leadership

LLM systems

Python

Distributed systems

APIs

Cloud infra

RAG pipelines

Prompt engineering

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Python

APIs

AWS

GCP

Kubernetes

Job description

Millions of people want to grow their money but don't know where to start. More than 90% of adults don’t access traditional financial advice. That's the gap Plum was built to close.

We're building the proactive money platform that makes it easy for people to smartly and sustainably grow their money. Whether you're stashing the cash for tea and toast in your first home or catching some rays during retirement, we've got your back.

Since 2016, millions of people across 10 European markets have set aside more than £10 billion with Plum. But what we're most excited about is what comes next and the opportunity for our people to help shape it.

We're now going after something even bigger: the £2 trillion+ advised market in the UK and beyond, currently locked behind high fees and complexity. By combining AI-driven financial guidance with the products people actually need, we're building a solution for everyone, not just the wealthy few.

At Plum, you'll be part of a team that's ambitious, curious and driven. We move fast, learn from what doesn't work, challenge the status quo and, most importantly, build something that makes people's lives better. We believe great ideas can come from anywhere, and that the best work happens when people feel trusted to take ownership, collaborate openly and bring their whole selves to work.

Join nearly 300 Plumsters and be part of a team shaping the future of money

The Role

At Plum, we’re looking for engineers who care deeply about technology, customer impact, and building things that scale.

We’re looking for a Staff AI Engineer to work across our AI Platform and Wealth Advisor teams, the teams behind the intelligence that powers Plum. The AI Platform team builds the foundations (model orchestration, retrieval, evaluation and guardrails) that every AI experience at Plum runs on, while the Wealth Advisor team uses those foundations to deliver trusted, personalised financial guidance to millions of customers. Together, they tackle some of Plum’s most important and technically interesting challenges: making AI-driven financial advice safe, accurate and accessible to everyone.

You’ll help shape the technical direction of AI at Plum, connecting LLM-powered products, backend systems, and financial infrastructure to create a platform that’s reliable, scalable, and built for rapid innovation.

What You Will Do

• Architect and design the core components of our AI platform, from model orchestration to retrieval (RAG), agentic workflows, prompt and context management, so that AI capabilities can be built once and adopted across every Plum team
• Lead the end-to-end development of LLM-powered customer experiences for the Wealth Advisor, from system design and tool integration through deployment, monitoring and iteration in production
• Build rigorous evaluation systems including golden datasets, LLM-as-judge grading, regression gates on prompt/model changes and offline-to-online metric correlation, so we can ship AI improvements quickly with confidence
• Design the guardrails, safety and observability layers (tracing, cost and latency monitoring, content and action controls) that make AI-driven financial guidance trustworthy in a regulated environment
• Drive the AI Strategic Vision and roadmap, evaluating emerging models, tools and techniques and ensuring our architecture supports high-volume experimentation, rapid iteration and future business needs
• Promote Continuous Improvement by driving architectural standards, engineering best practices, and operational excellence for AI systems across multiple teams
• Provide guidance to and mentor Senior Engineers and other team members, raising the bar on AI engineering craft and fostering a culture of technical excellence and career growth
• Identify root causes of systemic issues, from model quality regressions to architectural bottlenecks, determining short-term mitigations and long-term strategic resolutions
• Partner closely with Staff Engineers, Product Managers, Data Scientists and Compliance to design AI solutions that unlock new growth opportunities while meeting the standards expected of a regulated financial product

What We Look For

• Proven track record of technical leadership, with experience designing, shipping and operating LLM-powered systems in production at scale
• Hands-on experience across the modern AI stack: agentic systems (tool use, orchestration, multi-step planning), RAG and retrieval pipelines, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning where it adds value
• Rigour in evaluation methodology: you know how to measure whether an AI system is actually good, design evals that catch regressions, and make the data-backed “don’t ship” call when needed
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: Python, distributed systems, APIs, cloud infrastructure, that you have used over the years to build AI products on solid foundations
• High level of pragmatism; you understand when to build for scale and when to optimise for speed of learning, and you balance model capability against cost, latency and reliability
• Strong planning and prioritisation skills, with the ability to translate high-level business goals into actionable technical strategies across the AI stack
• Ability to share product insight with stakeholders, challenge product decisions with data, and act as a bridge between Engineering, Product, and Data Science
• Demonstrated capacity to clearly and concisely communicate about complex technical, architectural, and/or organisational challenges to both technical and non-technical executives
• Experience working within a cross-functional team and collaborative environment; ability to facilitate technical decision-making and resolve conflicts across teams
• Self-motivated and self-managing, with excellent organisational skills and a focus on high-leverage work
• An appreciation for the responsibility that comes with applying AI to people’s money. Awareness of safety, fairness and regulatory considerations is a strong plus

Plum Perks

• We're all in this together! Own part of the company through stock options
• Private health insurance
• Annual training budget
• Plum Max subscription for yourself and Boost for 2 friends or family members
• Referral scheme: earn competitive rewards up to 4k
• Flexible approach to remote working: we encourage at least 2 days a week in one of our beautiful offices in London, Athens or Cyprus
• Team breakfasts and team lunches
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays
• 45 work-from-anywhere days: giving you the flexibility to work your way
• 2 weeks & 6 weeks sabbatical after 4 years and 8 years respectively to take the break you deserve
• Enhanced parental leave
• Wedding allowance
• 1 paid volunteering day annually
• Annual team trip: to a surprise destination!
• A fun, inclusive company culture

If this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you!

Thanks,

Team Plum

* Plum is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Plum does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, non-disqualifying physical or mental disability, national origin or any other basis covered by appropriate law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need.