AI Engineer

boi; Porto; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Board of Innovation in Porto, Portugal is looking for an AI Engineer to design and ship production-grade AI systems, including multi-step agents and tool-using LLMs. You will own deployment pipelines, evals, observability, and the operations that ensure system reliability for client projects.

With 3+ years shipping AI-powered systems, you balance accuracy, latency, and cost, and wrap AI logic into reliable services used across applications.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience shipping AI-powered systems in production.
• Background in computer science, math, physics, engineering, or another technical field.
• Strong in Python and modern LLM engineering: agents, tool use, retrieval, evals.
• CI/CD, testing, version control hygiene, and code quality.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and ship AI systems that automate work and support decisions.
• Build multi-step agents and tool-using LLM systems and integrate data sources.
• Own evals, observability, and feedback loops for reliable production performance.
• Collaborate with engineers, strategists, and designers; participate in client conversations from scoping to delivery.

Skills

Python

LLM engineering

AI systems

CI/CD

Software engineering

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Math/Engineering

Tools

Git

Job description

About Board of Innovation

BOI partners with large, ambitious organizations to design and build applied AI products that create measurable business impact. We help enterprise and scale-up clients move beyond experimentation by embedding AI directly into their operations, decision-making, and products. Our work spans industries, but always centers on production-ready AI, strong engineering, and real-world adoption.

About the Role

We're looking for an AI Engineer to design and build the AI systems behind real, production-grade applications. This is applied engineering work: building agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, and orchestration layers that integrate into business-critical environments and stand up to real-world use.

You'll take AI capabilities from idea to deployment, owning the full path including evaluation, observability, and the operational concerns that determine whether a system survives contact with users.

What You'll Do

You'll design, implement, and ship AI systems that automate work, support decisions, and unlock new workflows for enterprise clients. Day-to-day, that means building multi-step agents and tool-using LLM systems, wiring them into structured and unstructured data sources, and packaging them into services that other engineers and applications can consume safely.

You'll also own how we know our systems work. That includes evals, observability, and the feedback loops that let us iterate with confidence rather than guesswork. You'll work closely with engineers, strategists, and designers, and you'll be in client conversations from early scoping through delivery.

What You Bring

You have 3+ years of experience shipping AI-powered systems in production, and a background in computer science, math, physics, engineering, or another technical or scientific field. You're strong in Python and fluent in the patterns of modern LLM engineering: agents, MCP, skills, tool use, retrieval, structured outputs, and evals.

You're also a real software engineer underneath. CI/CD, testing, version control hygiene, and code quality matter to you, because they're what let you keep moving fast without things falling over. You understand how to balance accuracy, latency, cost, and maintainability, and you've debugged enough production systems to have opinions about it. You're comfortable wrapping AI logic into services that other engineers can consume without surprises.

How You Work

You treat AI as an engineering discipline. You care about observability, maintainability, and the underlying engineering that makes the interesting parts possible. You're at home in a consulting environment, where each engagement brings a new domain and a new set of constraints.

At BOI, you will work a lot with strategists, designers, and consultants, and most of your clients aren't technical. You're comfortable translating between business problems and technical solutions, and you can hold your own in a client room without a project manager running interference for you.

The field moves quickly, and so do we. New models, new tools, and new patterns show up constantly. You enjoy that pace, actively pull in what's useful, and bring it back to the team. You push back when something doesn't make sense, and you care about building systems that get used long after the kickoff energy fades.

Contract & Setup

We are open to both permanent employment and long-term contractor arrangements. The final setup will depend on your location, work authorization status, and local compliance requirements.