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 reporting to the Senior Manager for Data & AI Products and will be one of the first hires in the team. 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

Build and ship AI-powered product features for Pleo’s customers, owning outcomes end-to-end for a scoped area
Design and build end-to-end RAG systems for specific product use cases
Own the full AI-product lifecycle: prompt design, context and state management, agentic loops, output parsing, edge case handling, and safe production deployment
Build evaluation datasets and automated eval pipelines
Instrument AI features for production observability: logging, drift detection, quality monitoring, and alerting
Collaborate with Product and Design to scope AI features from first principles
Partner with our GenAI Platform team to identify infrastructure needs and champion adoption of platform tooling
Support other engineers through reviews, pairing, and pragmatic technical leadership

What you bring

Proven experience shipping customer-facing AI features using LLMs
Deep practical experience with RAG system design and retrieval pipelines
Experience building and operating evaluation frameworks for LLM-based systems
Strong Python engineering skills
Experience building APIs and data retrieval pipelines
Enough data intuition to reason about data quality and retrieval architecture
Experience with agentic system patterns
Familiarity with public cloud providers (AWS, GCP)
Openness to contributing in Kotlin when needed

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 have moved past prototyping and understand realities of LLMOps
You understand data quality and retrieval without needing a dedicated data engineer

This role is not a good fit for you if:

You are primarily interested in model research or algorithm development
You need fully defined specs and a groomed backlog
You cannot explain AI trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders

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

The location

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
Lunch allowance or catered meals
Comprehensive private healthcare
25 days of holiday + public holidays
Hybrid and fully remote working options
Free mental health and well-being support via MyndUp
Paid parental leave

The interview process

Intro call: 30-minute chat with our Talent Partner
Technical screening: 15–30 minute call on key technical topics
System design interview: 75-minute practical session with engineers
Live coding interview: 75-minute practical session with engineers
Hiring Manager interview: 60-minute deep dive into knowledge and experience
Final interview: Leadership interview focusing on behavioural, communication and collaboration skills

About your application

English first: please submit your application in English
A fair look for everyone: every application is reviewed by a human
Diversity drives us: we encourage people from all backgrounds to apply
Interview at your best: accessibility accommodations available
Your data is safe: personal data processed per Privacy Policy
Applying for multiple roles: possible, assessed independently
Reapplying: wait six months before reapplying for the same role

Senior Applied AI Engineer