Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Intellect; Dublin; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Intellect Talent seeks a Senior AI Engineer for a global payments technology leader in Dublin. You will design and build scalable AI services, including LLM-driven workflows, RAG systems, and enterprise-grade data pipelines.

The role emphasizes security, reliability, and observability within a hybrid work model. Key focus areas include AI governance, tool/calling patterns, and productionising AI services using LangChain, LlamaIndex, Databricks, and Spark.

Qualifications

• Proven track record designing scalable software and AI-powered solutions.
• Experience with modern software engineering and distributed systems.
• Hands-on AI engineering with large language models and orchestration tools.

Responsibilities

• Lead design for AI-powered services and intelligent applications.
• Develop LLM-based solutions including RAG and AI orchestration.
• Implement tool- and function-calling across enterprise APIs.
• Build data pipelines and analytics using Databricks/Spark.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

RESTful APIs

Databricks

Spark/PySpark

LLMs/RAG

AI Orchestration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Software Engineering

Tools

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Cloud-native

Job description

Senior AI Engineer – Payments & Financial Technology

Location: Dublin - Hybrid

Contract: Permanent, Full-time

Hours: Full-time, Monday–Friday, 9:00am–5:00pm

Start Date: ASAP

About the Role

Intellect Talent is supporting a client that is a global leader in payments technology, helping organisations deliver secure, scalable, and innovative solutions across the financial technology ecosystem.

We are looking for a technically strong Senior AI Engineer with hands‑on experience across AI, LLMs, data engineering, and distributed systems. This is an opportunity to work on production‑grade AI solutions that solve complex business challenges and operate at significant enterprise scale.

You will join a small, agile, high‑trust engineering team responsible for embedding LLM‑driven and agentic capabilities into business‑critical platforms used by organisations worldwide.

You will combine strong software engineering fundamentals with practical AI expertise to design, build, and productionise intelligent services across areas including retrieval‑augmented generation, LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, data pipelines, and AI‑powered decision support.

Role Overview

The purpose of this role is to design, develop, and deliver scalable AI‑powered services within a complex payments and financial technology environment.

You will contribute to technical architecture, solution design, software development, data engineering, AI evaluation, performance optimisation, and production support.

You will take ownership across the full engineering lifecycle, from understanding business requirements and defining technical approaches through to implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing optimisation.

Working closely with engineers, architects, product stakeholders, data specialists, and other technical teams, you will help establish robust approaches to enterprise AI while ensuring solutions meet requirements for scalability, security, reliability, performance, observability, and maintainability.

Responsibilities

• Lead team‑level technical design for AI‑powered services and intelligent applications.
• Design and develop LLM‑based solutions, including retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), retrieval systems, and AI orchestration capabilities.
• Design and implement agentic workflows incorporating planning and reasoning loops, memory management, grounding, tool calling, and human‑in‑the‑loop processes.
• Develop production‑grade AI solutions using frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, and equivalent LLM orchestration technologies.
• Design and implement tool‑calling and function‑calling integrations across enterprise services and APIs.
• Develop and optimise data‑intensive applications and analytics capabilities using Databricks, Spark, and PySpark.
• Build scalable data pipelines capable of processing and delivering data reliably at enterprise scale.
• Develop software using Java, Spring Boot, RESTful APIs, and modern cloud‑native engineering practices.
• Assess and resolve performance bottlenecks across applications, APIs, services, data pipelines, and AI/LLM workloads.
• Apply appropriate architectural patterns to ensure AI services are scalable, secure, reliable, observable, and maintainable.
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks to measure the quality, reliability, safety, and performance of AI systems.
• Incorporate appropriate AI safety, governance, grounding, and validation mechanisms into production solutions.
• Translate business requirements into practical, scalable, and maintainable AI‑driven technical solutions.
• Collaborate with architects, engineers, product stakeholders, data teams, and other cross‑functional teams to deliver complex technology solutions.
• Participate in technical and architectural design reviews and evaluate technology and implementation trade‑offs.
• Provide technical mentoring and guidance to junior and mid‑level engineers through pairing, code reviews, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
• Promote high standards of engineering quality through automated testing, secure coding, observability, documentation, and production‑readiness practices.
• Troubleshoot complex issues across application, service, API, data, cloud, and AI/LLM layers.
• Lead root‑cause analysis and implement durable solutions to complex production issues.
• Contribute to reusable engineering patterns, technical documentation, standards, and knowledge assets.
• Maintain awareness of emerging AI, data, and cloud technologies and identify opportunities where they can provide business value.
• Undertake additional duties as required to support the AI engineering function.

Knowledge & Experience Required

• Proven experience designing and developing scalable software and AI‑powered solutions.
• Strong understanding of modern software engineering, distributed systems, cloud‑native architecture, and data‑intensive applications.
• Practical experience building production solutions using large language models and AI orchestration technologies.
• Strong understanding of RAG, retrieval systems, LLM integration, tool calling, and agentic AI patterns.
• Experience working with large‑scale data platforms and distributed data processing technologies.
• Demonstrated ability to translate complex business requirements into secure, scalable, and maintainable technical solutions.
• Experience contributing to technical architecture and leading team‑level solution design.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, collaboration, and consulting skills.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving abilities, with the capability to work through complex and ambiguous technical challenges.
• Experience working within agile engineering teams and taking ownership across the full software development lifecycle.

Mandatory

6+ years of professional software engineering experience building scalable, distributed systems and cloud‑native applications.

• Strong hands‑on experience with Java, Spring Boot, and RESTful APIs.
• Strong experience with Databricks and Spark/PySpark for data engineering and large‑scale data processing.
• Hands‑on experience building AI‑powered products using LLMs and RAG/retrieval systems.
• Experience with LLM orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent.
• Experience implementing tool calling/function calling patterns.
• Strong understanding of agentic AI concepts, including planning and reasoning loops, memory, grounding, evaluation frameworks, safety mechanisms, and human‑in‑the‑loop design.
• Proven ability to lead technical design, assess architectural trade‑offs, and make appropriate technology decisions.
• Strong understanding of software quality, testing, security, performance, reliability, observability, and production readiness.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with TypeScript and React.
• Strong knowledge of SQL and modern data technologies.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience working within payments, banking, financial services, insurance, or other highly regulated environments.
• Experience with AI governance, responsible AI, model evaluation, or enterprise AI risk management.
• Experience working with strategic technology partnerships or broader technology ecosystems.
• Relevant professional certifications in cloud, data, software engineering, or AI technologies.
• Sick Leave: Up to 5 days of company‑paid sick leave on a rolling basis
• Maternity Leave: Up to 16 weeks of paid maternity leave, combining statutory and company pay, subject to eligibility
• Paternity Leave: 2 weeks in line with company policy and the statutory scheme
• Private Medical Insurance: Up to €140 per month towards private health insurance
• Pension Scheme: Employee pension contributions up to 3% of salary

Working Arrangement

This is a permanent, full-time position based in Dublin.

The role operates on a hybrid basis, with standard working hours of 9:00am–5:00pm, Monday to Friday.

Candidates must be based in Ireland and able to work from the Dublin location as required. The role may also involve visiting client sites depending on business and project requirements.

About Intellect Talent

Intellect Talent is supporting this appointment on behalf of our client. We work with organisations to identify and attract highly skilled technology professionals for specialist and senior‑level positions.

If you are an experienced AI Engineer looking for the opportunity to work on cutting‑edge AI technologies within a global payments and financial technology environment, we would be interested in hearing from you.