Principal AI Architect / Staff Engineer

Cpl; Dublin; Hybrid; EUR 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Cpl Recruitment are partnering with a leading international organisation to appoint an experienced Principal AI Architect / Staff Engineer to join a growing AI engineering function in Dublin. This is a hands-on role for an experienced engineer who enjoys shaping technical strategy while remaining hands-on with architecture and software delivery.

Working across engineering, product, and business teams, you'll influence architecture, establish engineering standards, mentor senior engineers, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years' commercial software engineering experience, including senior technical leadership.
• Proven design and delivery of large-scale cloud-native platforms and distributed systems.
• Strong backend and API design experience, cloud infrastructure knowledge.
• Hands-on development with Python is strongly preferred.
• Experience with LLMs, AI agents, RAG, and AI orchestration is a plus.
• Ability to mentor engineers and influence across multiple teams.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

Responsibilities

• Define architecture and technical roadmap for AI-powered platforms and apps.
• Design scalable, secure, cloud-native solutions across teams.
• Lead adoption of AI engineering best practices (LLMs, RAG, AI orchestration).
• Drive architectural decisions while ensuring consistency and technical excellence.
• Build reusable platform services and developer tooling to accelerate delivery.
• Collaborate with leadership to shape long-term technology strategy.
• Mentor senior engineers through architecture reviews and guidance.
• Promote CI/CD, testing, observability, security, and platform reliability.
• Evaluate new technologies and translate business challenges into scalable solutions.

Skills

AI architecture

Cloud-native design

Mentoring engineers

Stakeholder management

Python development

Google Cloud

AWS

Azure

CI/CD

Observability

Security governance

Tools

Python

Google Cloud

AWS

Azure

Job description

• Cpl Recruitment are partnering with a leading international organisation to appoint an experienced Principal AI Architect / Staff Engineer to join a growing AI engineering function in Dublin.
• This is a hands on role for an experienced engineer who enjoys shaping technical strategy while remaining hands-on with architecture and software delivery. You'll play a key role in defining the technical direction of a modern AI platform, enabling engineering teams to build scalable, production-grade AI products that deliver real business value.
• Working across engineering, product, and business teams, you'll influence architecture, establish engineering standards, mentor senior engineers, and help build the next generation of AI-powered applications using modern cloud and generative AI technologies.

Dublin | Hybrid

• Cpl Recruitment are partnering with a leading international organisation to appoint an experienced Principal AI Architect / Staff Engineer to join a growing AI engineering function in Dublin.
• This is a hands on role for an experienced engineer who enjoys shaping technical strategy while remaining hands-on with architecture and software delivery. You'll play a key role in defining the technical direction of a modern AI platform, enabling engineering teams to build scalable, production-grade AI products that deliver real business value.
• Working across engineering, product, and business teams, you'll influence architecture, establish engineering standards, mentor senior engineers, and help build the next generation of AI-powered applications using modern cloud and generative AI technologies.

Responsibilities

• Define the architecture and technical roadmap for AI-powered platforms and applications.
• Design scalable, secure, and resilient cloud-native solutions using modern engineering principles.
• Lead the adoption of AI engineering best practices, including LLMs, AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and intelligent workflow orchestration.
• Drive architectural decisions across multiple engineering initiatives while promoting consistency and technical excellence.
• Build reusable platform services, developer tooling, and shared capabilities that accelerate product delivery.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to shape long-term technology strategy and platform evolution.
• Mentor senior engineers through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and engineering best practices.
• Champion modern software engineering practices, including CI/CD, automated testing, observability, security, and platform reliability.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and identify opportunities to introduce new capabilities that create measurable business value.
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to translate complex business challenges into scalable technical solutions.

Requirements

• 8+ years' commercial software engineering experience, including significant time operating as a Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Lead Architect, or similar senior technical leadership role.
• Proven experience designing and delivering large-scale cloud-native platforms and distributed systems.
• Strong software architecture expertise across backend services, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and modern application design.
• Extensive hands‑on development experience, with Python strongly preferred.
• Strong experience with Google Cloud, or equivalent expertise across AWS or Azure.
• Commercial experience delivering production-grade generative AI solutions using technologies such as LLMs, AI agents, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), vector databases, prompt engineering, and AI orchestration frameworks.
• Experience designing reusable AI platforms and shared engineering capabilities rather than standalone proofs of concept.
• Strong understanding of software quality, security, scalability, CI/CD, observability, and engineering governance.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Comfortable operating within fast‑paced, high‑growth engineering environments.

Desirable

• Experience with Google Agent Platform (Vertex AI), Gemini APIs, or similar AI ecosystems.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, engineering tooling, or AI infrastructure.
• Knowledge of MLOps, AI governance, and production AI lifecycle management.
• Experience within media, entertainment, digital content, or other large-scale consumer technology environments.
• Contributions to open-source projects or recognised technical leadership within engineering communities.