Principal Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Hybrid in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom; remote work is also listed.

Company

hirify.global operates in the payments and financial technology sector.

What you will do

• Define and lead AI strategy for the Integrated Engineering organisation in alignment with business priorities, product direction, architecture, security, and measurable outcomes.
• Identify, prioritise, and validate AI opportunities across product experiences, engineering workflows, developer productivity, quality engineering, operations, support, platform modernisation, knowledge management, and partner ecosystems.
• Improve engineering effectiveness through applied AI, automation, simplification, modern tooling, Continuous Delivery, and measurable continuous improvement.
• Establish AI engineering standards, reusable patterns, reference architectures, evaluation approaches, knowledge-sharing forums, and mentoring practices.
• Champion responsible and secure AI adoption covering data protection, privacy, reliability, explainability, observability, operational support, regulatory expectations, and ethical use.
• Coach engineers and promote observable, testable, reliable, supportable, and customer-focused AI-enabled engineering outcomes.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• Strong hands-on engineering experience building, deploying, and scaling production-ready software applications and AI-powered products.
• Exceptional communication, stakeholder management, and storytelling skills, with the ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience implementing AI/ML operational practices, including Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment, automation, data governance, or real-time data processing solutions.
• Understanding of responsible AI practices, including governance, security, privacy, risk assessment, testing, monitoring, human oversight, auditability, and safe enterprise adoption.
• Hands-on experience identifying and resolving performance and scalability issues across distributed application architectures and databases.
• Understanding of database design and development, design patterns, refactoring, object-oriented design, and modern software development practices.
• Experience creating and authenticating SOAP and RESTful web-service endpoints.
• Experience working in Agile Scrum or Lean Kanban environments, with strong analytical, problem-solving, and organisational skills.

Nice to have

• Payments domain expertise.
• Experience with Natural Language Processing, conversational AI agents, or large language model application development frameworks.
• Knowledge of cloud and data platforms.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work arrangement based in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.
• Collaboration with Engineering, Operations, DevOps, Security, and Compliance teams.
• Focus on responsible AI, strong engineering discipline, quality, customer outcomes, and continuous improvement.
• Opportunities to mentor engineers, build internal AI communities, and influence enterprise-wide engineering practices.