Staff Engineer (GenAI Core)

About Pleo

Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved not just finance. At Pleo were 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 youd expect and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.

Now were at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40000 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 cant say weve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly thats half the fun! What we can say is that were 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.

At Pleo were on a mission to make spend management surprisingly effective and empowering.

Were hiring a Staff Engineer to join the GenAI Core team. You will help set technical direction for Pleos AI platform the shared infrastructure that enables product teams across the company to build AI-powered features reliably and at scale.

What GenAI Core does

GenAI Core owns and operates Pleos AI platform infrastructure. We are the team that makes it possible for every other product team at Pleo to build AI-powered features reliably observably and without reinventing the wheel.

That means:

• LLM routing and access: a centralised LLM proxy layer (LiteLLM) that routes requests to different model providers (Azure OpenAI AWS Bedrock Google Gemini) with budget enforcement and rate limiting

• Observability and evaluation: integrations and tooling (BrainTrust) to monitor log and evaluate LLM calls in production supporting both automated evaluation and human review

• Platform standards and guidance: we define how AI is done at Pleo providing patterns contracts and shared components that product teams build on

• Internal consulting: as product teams across Pleo adopt AI capabilities GenAI Core will increasingly act as a technical partner helping teams design and implement AI features correctly on top of the platform

This is software engineering work. While the domain revolves around AI infrastructure you will spend most of your time building reliable scalable backend systems.

What youll be doing

In this role you will be a force multiplier for platform quality and technical direction.

• Drive the design delivery and evolution of the GenAI Core platform the shared AI infrastructure used by all product teams at Pleo

• Own and evolve service architecture APIs and integration contracts with a high bar for reliability and observability

• Set technical direction for key parts of the platform including LLM routing budget enforcement observability pipelines and evaluation infrastructure

• Lead cross-team technical initiatives and act as a trusted technical partner when product teams need to build AI-powered features on top of the platform

• Raise the engineering bar through strong practices: code reviews incident follow-ups safe change management and resilient system design

• Proactively identify and address technical debt and guide the team through architectural decisions and migrations

• Support other engineers through pairing reviews and technical guidance

• Contribute hands-on in code. You should expect to be coding a meaningful part of the time.

Youll bring solid experience with

• Designing and maintaining backend systems with strong requirements for reliability and observability

• Building and operating a shared platform or infrastructure components used by multiple teams

• Distributed systems fundamentals including async workflows idempotency consistency and designing for failure

• API design clear service boundaries and integrating with external systems in a maintainable way

• Observability and owning systems in production including monitoring alerting incident response and post-mortems

• Strong testing practices and a high quality mindset

• Clear communication and pragmatic decision-making across teams and stakeholders

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience working with LLM APIs (OpenAI Anthropic AWS Bedrock or similar) in a production system

• Familiarity with LLM evaluation patterns such as LLM-as-judge vector similarity and sampling strategies

• Experience building or operating proxy or routing layers for AI workloads

Your colleagues would say you

• Lead by example and raise the bar with pragmatism and care

• Communicate clearly listen well and bring people along in decisions

• Enjoy breaking down complex problems gathering input and driving to a solution

• Coach and mentor others and create space for people to grow

• Prefer progress over perfection while still caring deeply about quality

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 both hybrid and fully remote working options

• We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far

• Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that were supportive of families and help you feel that you dont have to compromise your family due to work

About your application

• English first. Since its our company language please submit your application in English. Youll be using it a lot if you join us.

• A fair look for everyone. Our talent team reads every single application to ensure the process is fair. To keep things running smoothly we only accept applications through our systemour support team cant pass on calls or emails.

• Diversity drives us. We can only reach our goals if our team reflects the world around us. That starts with you hitting apply even if you dont tick every single box. We encourage people from all backgrounds and experiences to join us.

• Interview at your best. We want you to feel comfortable throughout the process. If you have any accessibility requirements or need a specific format email Well design a process that works for you.

• Your data is safe. When you apply we process your personal data as a data processor. For more information on how Pleo processes personal data read our Privacy Policy here.

• Applying for multiple roles Nothing is stopping you and we assess every role independently. However we do look for alignment so make sure you can explain why your interest and experience are right for each specific role.

• Reapplying. If youre applying for the same role again please wait six months from your last decision before hitting submit.

Required Experience:

Staff IC