The Role
We're hiring a Founding AI Engineer to build the systems that allow AI to operate safely, reliably, and repeatedly inside Grand.
This is a high-impact individual contributor role focused on turning intelligence into production-grade capability. You'll work AI-first by default, but with an engineer's instinct for control, failure modes, and long-term system integrity.
This is not a product feature role and not a research role. You won't own UX or model theory. You will own how AI runs in the system: orchestration, guardrails, observability, auditability, and lifecycle management.
You'll sit close to the founders, product, data science, and regulatory teams, shaping how AI decisions are triggered, constrained, inspected, and acted upon in a regulated environment. This is a seat at the founders' table, building the nervous system of the company.
What You'll Do
* Design and build the runtime and orchestration layer for AI systems across the platform
* Turn probabilistic AI outputs into controlled, repeatable system behaviour
* Define how AI decisions are triggered, gated, validated, and executed
* Build guardrails, fallbacks, and confidence thresholds into AI flows
* Design human-in-the-loop and escalation paths where required
* Own prompt lifecycle management, evaluation, and versioning
* Manage context assembly, scoping, and data boundaries for AI tasks
* Build systems for logging, tracing, replay, and auditability
* Control latency, cost, reliability, and degradation in production
* Partner closely with AI data scientists to productionise models and signals
* Collaborate with product engineers to integrate AI safely into workflows
* Ensure AI systems are defensible, inspectable, and regulator-ready
Must Have
* Strong backend engineering fundamentals
* Proven experience shipping AI or LLM-based systems into production
* Experience designing distributed systems with state, retries, and failure handling
* Comfort working with probabilistic systems in high-consequence environments
* Experience building guardrails, validation layers, or control flows around AI
* Strong understanding of observability, logging, and system diagnostics
* Experience managing model or prompt lifecycles in real systems
* Ability to reason clearly about failure modes and degradation
* Clear communicator who can explain complex system behaviour plainly
* High technical judgment and strong ownership instincts
Nice to Have
* Experience operating AI systems in regulated or high-stakes environments
* Familiarity with agentic systems, task orchestration, or workflow engines
* Experience with hybrid systems (rules + AI + humans)
* Exposure to payments, fintech, or risk-sensitive domains
* Background in early-stage or zero-to-one engineering teams
* Experience designing systems that must be audited or replayed
Salary and Benefits
* Excellent Salary: Competitive and reflective of the responsibility of a founding role
* Equity Options: Meaningful ownership in a long-term company
* Hybrid Work: At least 3 days in our London or Dublin office
* Extended Remote Work on Request: Outcomes matter more than optics
* Builders, Not Tourists: Work with people who care deeply about getting this right
Who You Are
You're a systems engineer first, who happens to work with AI. You're less interested in demos and more interested in what happens when things go wrong.
You think in flows, constraints, and failure paths. You're comfortable saying "this shouldn't be automated yet" and designing for gradual trust.
You've seen what breaks when AI leaves the sandbox, and you build accordingly. You care about traceability, responsibility, and long-term credibility.
You thrive in ambiguity, enjoy hard systems problems, and take pride in building infrastructure that other engineers trust.
You're based in Dublin or in close commuting distance (or ready to be), and ready to help build something genuinely new.
If this sounds like you, let's talk.