Staff Applied AI Engineer

ABOUT PLEO Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’. The word ‘Pleo’ actually means ‘more than you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years. Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together. ABOUT THE ROLE This is an exciting opportunity to help shape how Pleo builds AI-powered product features, working alongside software engineers, data engineers and data scientists to take ideas from prototype to production. Pleo has over 40,000 customers and a decade of unique spend data — an incredible foundation to build on. Your mission will be to harness this data to create real product value. WHO YOU’LL BE WORKING WITH AND REPORTING TO You'll be one of the first hires in our Data & AI Products team but, rest assured, you will not be working solo! You will work very closely with other Engineers and Data Scientists, each bringing distinctive skills while you bring applied AI engineering and data context. Together, the team covers the full chain from data to shipped product. Your core focus is on building and shipping AI-powered features, with a strong collaborative element across Product Engineering, AI Platform, and Data & ML Platform teams. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING As a Staff Applied AI Engineer you will: - Build and ship multiple AI-powered product features, setting the bar for delivery at Pleo, across agentic workflows, spend intelligence, automated actions, and more. - Bring deep applied AI expertise and strong judgment on trade-offs (quality vs latency/cost, build vs buy, agent patterns vs simpler approaches) and help teams avoid hype-driven decisions. - Work directly with Product, Design, Engineering, and business stakeholders to advise and prioritise on what's actually worth building. You aren't just implementing specs, you're discovering and defining the product. - Own the evaluation, monitoring, and operationalisation of AI features: setting up evals, tracking drift and performance, and managing prompt changes safely in production. You will help establish how Pleo does this at scale and own the development in production. - Act as a design partner to the GenAI Core platform team: challenge decisions with evidence from real feature delivery, bring clear requirements, and validate platform choices in production. - Establish and enforce practical standards for AI feature delivery in product squads (evaluation strategy, monitoring expectations, safe prompt/versioning practices, privacy & safety guardrails) using GenAI Platform tooling (not building the platform itself). - Upskill the team through mentorship, reviews, pairing, and lightweight playbooks that make other engineers faster. WHAT YOU BRING You will thrive in this role if you have: - Proven experience shipping multiple GenAI features into production, at scale in a customer-facing product. You've moved past prototype phases and ideally have experience shipping multi-step, tool-using agents in a user-facing product. - The ability to translate complex business challenges and product visions into scalable AI solutions. In other words, you can autonomously scope, design and build. - Deep applied AI judgment: you can reason about evaluation, retrieval quality, tool use, failure modes, and what is/isn’t worth building. - Experience applying evaluation and observability to LLM systems (tests, golden sets, online metrics, monitoring) and using those signals to iterate. - Strong understanding of privacy and security concerns when building LLM applications: prompt injection, handling PII and data leakage risk. - Solid experience with the modern AI stack including Vector DBs, orchestration and durable execution frameworks, and LLM APIs. - Experience building APIs, services and data retrieval pipelines (RAG, vector search etc) to feed data into LLMs. - Deep proficiency with Python for both data and ML engineering, SQL and major cloud providers. - An extensive background in traditional ML engineering and a deep understanding of how to architect and build data systems for reliable and scalable production-use. - Ability to influence cross-functionally with Product/Design/Engineering and bring teams along on decisions. To share extra context, our current tech stack includes GCP, BigQuery, Airflow, Python, SQL on the Data side and AWS, Kotlin, Javascript, Typescript on the Product side while our infrastructure is containerised with Kubernetes. Experience across those technologies or languages would be considered a bonus. WHY IS THIS ROLE A GOOD FIT FOR YOU This role is a good fit for you if: - You have strong product instincts and build with the user in mind. You understand that a model is only as good as the problem it solves. - You have moved past prototyping and have a deep understanding of the realities of LLMOps, data retrieval, prompt and context engineering, as well as model evaluation in production. - You don't just call APIs, you understand the data feeding the AI system and can reason about data quality, architecture, and retrieval without needing a dedicated data engineer beside you at all times. This role is not a good fit for you if: - You want to focus on research and algorithm development. We need someone who cares about shipping solutions to production right now, turning AI concepts into functional features that solve real financial problems today. - You need a perfectly groomed backlog, structured tooling and pre-defined specs. We expect our Staff Engineers to be able to navigate ambiguity, to autonomously scope solutions and build any new tooling that might be required. - You can't explain complex AI trade-offs to a CEO or a designer without losing them in the weeds. You work well with stakeholders who are very technically or commercially focused. HOW YOU’LL DEVELOP IN THIS ROLE In your first 6 months at Pleo, you’ll: - Familiarise yourself with our codebase, tooling and roadmap. - Partner with our Principal Engineer to define and own our approach to AI feature development. - Contribute to shaping the roadmap for tooling and features developed by our GenAI Core team. - Collaborate with Product and Data teams to ship a first feature to production We’re committed to helping you develop your career, whether that means taking on bigger projects, stepping into leadership, or acquiring new skills! THE LOCATION Please note: We can hire on a remote, hybrid or in-person set-up in any of the locations listed on the advert but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. SHOW ME THE BENEFITS! - Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!) - Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office - Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis - We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays - For our Team, we offer bo