AI Engineer

Location: Portugal

Department: Engineering

Employment: Full time

About YLD:

Everything we do is to empower our clients to move forward. Our purpose is to help our clients develop the capabilities they need to outperform their competitors. Our success is a consequence of ensuring our clients are successful. Our company is built on extraordinary people; we aim to attract inspire develop and retain them. YLD is a software engineering and design consultancy; we create digital capabilities for our clients that last beyond our engagement. We have offices in London Lisbon Porto.

About the role:

As a Software Engineer youll be part of a client team building innovative products. We expect you to be curious passionate driven and enthusiastic. Youll be proficient at problem-solving and crafting scalable resilient and fault-tolerant architectures. Youll be an effective communicator and a team player. You and your team will move in a fast-paced engineering environment achieving outstanding results and delivering exciting projects.

About you:

A YLD Software Engineering Consultant is a highly skilled developer who exemplifies the highest standard in software engineering and enjoys sharing their knowledge and experience with others.

Youll have the opportunity to build and deliver software within some interesting projects in terms of the product and methodology. We work in an Agile environment (Scrum) with a test-first mindset (actually writing code without tests should be unthinkable). We are also big advocates of pair programming and nothing is released until we have a code review.

You have a real passion for problem-solving and are an active learner who gets excited by working collaboratively with those around you.

Your day-to-day responsibilities will look like this:

• Crafting excellent products! As an AI Engineer you will be building new AI-powered features that meet the needs of our clients customers as well as improving their Digital Platform with intelligent capabilities;
• Continuously delivering changes to products including AI model integrations prompt optimisations and system improvements as we push for a full CI/CD model;
• Working closely with your team regularly collaborating on both traditional engineering and AI initiatives to continually push yourselves to build better smarter systems;
• Participating in regular show and tells to promote your work from AI experiments to production deployments to both your department and the wider company;
• Joining our clients internal events including meeting external speakers going to quiz nights etc.

Youll have the following skills and experience:

Core Programming & AI

• Proven strong experience with JavaScript TypeScript and Python
• Advanced GenAI/LLM expertise: RAG embeddings vector search prompt engineering evals guardrails caching chaining function calling etc
• Fine-tuning expertise: LoRA/QLoRA instruction tuning RLHF domain adaptation and custom model training
• Agentic architecture design: multi-agent systems tool orchestration planning/reasoning frameworks memory systems and agent coordination patterns
• Eval systems: automated evals human feedback loops benchmarking A/B testing safety testing hallucination detection and performance metrics
• Experience with LLM frameworks (LangChain LlamaIndex LiteLLM CrewAI Mastra etc) and API integrations (OpenAI Anthropic etc.)

Infrastructure & DevOps

• CI/CD pipelines and IaC tools (Terraform CloudFormation CDK)
• Cloud platforms (AWS Azure GCP) for GenAI workloads and API management
• Containerisation and orchestration (Docker Kubernetes) for AI applications
• LLM hosting and inference optimisation (vLLM TGI local deployment)

Data & Databases

• Vector databases (Pinecone Weaviate Chroma Qdrant) and traditional databases (PostgreSQL Neo4j)
• Data pipeline design for RAG and knowledge ingestion
• Real-time data streaming and processing
• Document processing and embedding generation workflows

Frontend & APIs

• React or modern UI frameworks
• API design for LLM services and conversational interfaces
• Multiple protocols (HTTP GraphQL gRPC WebSockets MCP)
• Real-time chat and streaming response handling

Performance & Reliability

• Building high-performance scalable AI applications
• LLM cost optimisation token management and caching strategies
• Performance monitoring observability and debugging production AI systems
• Comprehensive testing: unit integration AI behaviour security accessibility

Youll be:

• Self-motivated proactive and always looking for ways to improve and develop yourself;
• A good communicator both in writing and verbally. Youll be able to explain technical ideas and concepts in business-friendly language;
• Detail oriented;
• Used to working in a team-oriented collaborative environment;
• Comfortable with experimentation iteration and managing uncertainty in AI systems;
• Analytical and problem-solving oriented;
• Ethical thinker who considers the broader implications of AI implementations;
• A genuine believer in diversity and fairness.

As well as the chance to work with a forward-thinking ethical and fun group of people youll also get:

• Company Private Health care
• Enhanced fully paid maternity and paternity leave for up to 6 months
• 25 days annual holiday (excluding Public Holidays)
• 2000 annual allowance for Training/Conferences
• 300 annual allowance for additional hardware
• Mental Health support: access to Spill app
• Meditation/Sleep support: Headspace or Calm app subscription
• Bonus (depending on Company performance and results)
• Company laptop
• Generous referral schemes

Our typical Recruitment Process looks like this:

• 1st Interview with someone from the Talent team (30/45 mins)
• Technical Interview with our Senior Developers (1h30)

We live and breathe our values and know you will too:

• Growing every day
• Including everyone
• Relationships built on honesty and ethics
• Inspiring solutions
• Winning together

Were an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity of all kinds. We dont discriminate based on race religion colour national origin gender sexual orientation pregnancy or maternity age marital status or disability status. We also offer a remote-first working environment meaning that flexible working and work-life balance come as standard for all employees.