Applied AI Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for an Applied AI Engineer to join the AI Experience team.

You will work at the intersection of software engineering, product thinking, and applied AI. Some weeks, you might be prototyping a new finance copilot experience. Other weeks, you might be improving how an agent reasons over transaction data, building evaluation pipelines, or making an AI workflow more reliable in production.

You should be comfortable with ambiguity. We do not expect every problem to come with a clear spec. Part of the role is figuring out what is worth building, what should be automated, where AI helps, and where traditional software is the better answer.

If you enjoy exploring new AI capabilities but care deeply about turning them into reliable systems, this role should feel exciting.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Design and build AI-powered product experiences for finance and spend management.
• Build chat experiences, copilots, autonomous workflows, and internal AI tools that solve real customer and operational problems.
• Work with LLMs, structured financial data, APIs, and business logic to build production-grade AI systems. This includes retrieval systems such as vector search, hybrid retrieval, and text-to-SQL, plus OCR and document understanding.
• Design AI solutions using the right approach for the problem; whether that’s tool calling, retrieval, agentic workflows, deterministic logic, or a combination of them.
• Build systems that are observable and explainable, not black boxes. Put guardrails and quality monitoring in place so we can trust them in production.
• Create evaluation approaches that help us measure whether our AI systems are actually improving.
• Experiment with new models and techniques, then turn the useful ones into production features.
• Think carefully about accuracy, latency, cost, reliability, and user trust.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to shape what we build.
• Help raise the AI engineering bar across Pliant.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

• Experience shipping AI-powered products or features into production.
• Strong software engineering skills in Java (Spring Boot) and/or Python ecosystem.
• Knowledge of distributed architecture patterns and anti-patterns. Experience with cloud infrastructure, Terraform, and scalable backend systems is a plus.
• A good understanding of how modern LLM-based applications are built beyond simple prompting. It helps if you have used frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, or LangGraph and understand the underlying concepts well enough not to depend on any single one.
• Hands-on experience with common LLM interaction patterns such as tool calling, memory, structured outputs, RAG, embeddings, agentic loops, and evaluation.
• The ability to design systems where AI is part of a larger architecture, not the whole architecture.
• A product mindset: you care about whether the thing you build is useful, not just whether it is technically interesting.
• The ability to move between experimentation and production-quality engineering.
• Strong communication skills and comfort working in a cross-functional team.
• It is a plus if you have worked in fintech, accounting, spend management, payments, or banking.

WHAT WE OFFER

• The opportunity to work in a growing team with big responsibilities that thrives on a strong exchange of knowledge and excellence
• Attractive remuneration
• Your choice of preferred OS, Windows or Mac
• Flat hierarchy and transparent communication in a relaxed, professional atmosphere
• Opportunity to develop your talent in a dynamic team with ambitious goals
• Flexibility and possibility to work remotely
• Pliant Card with monthly credit to explore the product and enjoy food with colleagues

Pliant is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and abilities, and are committed to an inclusive hiring process. If you need any accommodations during the interview process, please let us know.