AI Enablement Engineer

Phorest; Ireland; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private healthcare

Employee Share Purchase Scheme

Pension

Life Assurance

Bike to work

Job summary

Phorest is seeking a Staff Software Engineer — AI Enablement to join as a founding member of the AI Enablement team. The role is highly autonomous and hands-on, working across Phorest to identify leverageable opportunities and build AI-driven solutions.

You will set technical direction, prototype AI tools, and drive from discovery to production, balancing build versus buy, security, cost and maintainability. The position offers diverse benefits and learning opportunities.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience designing, building and operating complex production software.
• Strong architecture across APIs, cloud, security, scalability.
• Experience leading high-impact initiatives across teams.
• Curiosity about AI, governance, cost and security.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for AI Enablement and establish patterns and standards.
• Identify and prioritise high-leverage AI opportunities across functions.
• Prototype and deliver AI-powered tools, agents, automations or software.
• Scale AI initiatives with measurable business value and governance.
• Mentor engineers and raise AI capability across the organisation.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across technical and non-technical teams.
• Measure outcomes and justify investments with evidence.

Skills

AI Enablement

Staff Engineer

Communication

Product instincts

Mentoring

Autonomy

Job description

• We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer — AI Enablement to become a founding member of our AI Enablement team
• This is a highly autonomous hands-on Staff engineering role
• You’ll work across Phorest to identify the highest-leverage opportunities, understand how work really happens, and use AI, automation or software to create measurable business impact
• You’ll combine deep technical expertise with strong product judgement, alongside strong commercial and strategic thinking — taking ambiguous problems from discovery through experimentation and into reliable production systems
• The goal isn’t to put AI everywhere. It’s to find where technology can create the greatest leverage, choose the right approach, prove the value it creates, and build the foundations that allow that impact to scale
• Set the technical direction for AI Enablement: identify and lead solutions to complex, high-leverage problems across the business and establish the engineering patterns and standards that others can build on
• Find and deliver the biggest opportunities: work directly with functions to understand their goals and workflows, prioritise where AI Enablement can create the most value, and drive work from problem through to outcome
• Build the right solution: rapidly prototype and deliver AI-powered tools, agents, automations or conventional software, making pragmatic build‑vs‑buy decisions based on value, capability, cost, security and maintainability
• Build production systems teams can depend on: ensure critical solutions are scalable, secure, observable, reliable, maintainable and appropriately owned
• Measuring impact: Establish a baseline before each engagement and measure the outcomes afterwards, including engineering, tooling and model costs versus the value created. You will use this evidence to influence future investment, prioritisation and decision‑making
• Build for scale: create reusable capabilities, governance and ways of working that make future engagements faster and safer, while helping to shape and manage AI tooling, security, production use and spend across Phorest
• Act as a multiplier: share knowledge, mentor others and help raise AI and engineering capability across the organisation. Provide high‑quality actionable feedback, establishing best practices that enable others to make good AI and technical decisions independently
• Every engagement should ultimately answer: What changed? What did it cost? What value did it create?
• In your first 90 days:
• You will build a strong understanding of Phorest’s strategy, business model, customers, key workflows and the opportunities created by emerging AI capabilities
• You will proactively identify and prioritise the highest‑leverage opportunities, build relationships across technical and non‑technical functions, and establish a clear view of where AI Enablement can create meaningful strategic, commercial and organisational impact
• You will lead an initial opportunity from discovery through experimentation and into production, demonstrating measurable value
• You will also begin establishing the strategic principles, technical patterns, governance and operating model that will allow AI Enablement to scale beyond individual engagements
• Longer term:
• Success means building a repeatable AI Enablement model that delivers many multiples of its cost in measurable business value
• You’ll help establish the technical direction and framework that allow a growing AI Enablement team to work across multiple functions, reuse what works and continuously increase its impact
• Prove the model at the scale of one. Demonstrate the return. Scale what works

Benefits

• Your wellbeing is important to us - We provide private healthcare, and employee assistance program and a free online GP service (WebDoc)
• As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection
• We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets
• We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity benefits
• We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment including an extensive onboarding program
• Career development is important to us. We even have our own in‑house Learning and Development/Business coach and many online resources including LinkedIn learning
• We don’t believe in formal dress codes. We prefer casual things

We’re looking for a Staff-level engineer who combines deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, strong product judgement and practical AI experienceExcellent communication, listening and collaboration skills across technical and non‑technical stakeholdersStrong product and commercial instincts — able to take an ambiguous problem through discovery, experimentation, user feedback and production deliveryExperience leading complex, high‑impact technical initiatives across team or functional boundariesThe ability to operate autonomously, influence without authority and drive critical work through to measurable outcomesMost importantly, you’ll be deeply curious about AI, constantly exploring what’s becoming possible, and motivated by turning those possibilities into meaningful improvements in how an organisation operatesStrong judgement around the evolving AI landscape, build vs buy, governance, security, quality and costA track record of raising the effectiveness of others through technical leadership, mentoring and knowledge sharingStrong strategic judgement — connecting technical decisions to business outcomes and balancing short‑term experimentation with sustainable long‑term solutionsPreferably 10+ years experience designing, building and operating complex production software, with the technical breadth and judgement expected of a Staff EngineerStrong architecture and software engineering fundamentals across APIs, integrations, cloud infrastructure, security, scalability, observability and reliabilityYou have a strong growth mindset, actively seeking and providing high‑quality actionable feedback, and role model Phorest’s values as a culture ambassadorStrong practical experience with modern AI, ideally including AI‑powered products, internal AI tooling or production LLM applicationsResearch shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every boxExperience building tools that help other teams use AI effectively, agentic systems, AI evaluation and orchestration, or establishing AI governance and managing AI tooling and model spend