Staff AI Engineer (AI Labs)

Location: Hybrid in Madrid, Barcelona, London, or Bucharest

Company

Financial infrastructure company powering global commerce and payment ecosystems across more than 60 countries.

What you will do

• Scout, prototype, and evaluate emerging AI models, tools, frameworks, agentic systems, vector databases, and orchestration technologies.
• Design evaluation environments with datasets, prompts, scenarios, telemetry, regression tracking, and benchmark coverage.
• Build focused prototypes to assess architecture, integration patterns, security boundaries, operational constraints, and failure modes.
• Compare vendor and open-source solutions across quality, cost, latency, security, and integration complexity.
• Write decision memos and readiness guidance, then coordinate validated technologies with engineering teams for productionization.
• Work with Security, Legal, Compliance, and AI teams on risk assessments, governance, guardrails, and reusable standards.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant senior or Staff-level scope.
• Deep hands-on experience building and evaluating LLM-based systems and modern AI tooling.
• Experience with agentic or multi-step AI systems involving tool use, orchestration, state, retrieval, or external integrations.
• Strong software engineering, cloud infrastructure, observability, telemetry, testing, benchmarking, reliability, and distributed-systems skills.
• Experience designing evaluation datasets and benchmarks, including labelling, holdout discipline, LLM-as-judge methods, human evaluation, and statistical reasoning.
• Ability to communicate technical results clearly, influence without authority, and make trade-off decisions across quality, latency, cost, and vendor lock-in.

Nice to have

• Experience with AWS AI tooling and external copilots.
• Experience mentoring engineers, participating in technical hiring, and sharing knowledge through talks or meetups.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible schedules focused on impact and productivity rather than fixed hours.
• Hybrid collaboration combining self-managed focus time with in-person connection.
• Opportunity to work on applied AI challenges in the fintech industry.
• Work from anywhere while traveling for up to three months per year.
• Referral bonus program and country-specific benefits.