Principal Engineer (AI)

Location: United Kingdom; flexible hybrid and remote options, with on-site work at client sites and occasional travel to client sites or hirify.global offices.

Company

hirify.global is a software consultancy delivering engineering work for enterprise and scale-up clients.

What you will do

• Define architectures, specifications, technical decisions, and review standards for production systems.
• Use AI tools and context engineering to accelerate delivery while maintaining quality, security, evaluation, and reliability guardrails.
• Design and improve distributed backend systems, APIs, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, governance, lineage, vector stores, embeddings, and full-stack platforms.
• Apply system thinking, commercial judgement, and clear technical reasoning in consultancy and client environments.
• Communicate decisions through documents, design notes, and post-mortems; mentor engineers in technical and AI fluency.
• Build trusted in-person relationships with clients and work on-site when required.

Requirements

• Exceptional engineering capability with depth in at least one technical area and competence across the full stack.
• Strong architecture, engineering foundations, communication, system thinking, and technical judgement.
• Practical understanding of distributed systems, eventual consistency, queues, durable APIs, and thoughtful data modelling.
• Cloud experience with cost and security awareness, infrastructure as code, and composition of cloud primitives.
• Understanding of modern data pipelines, governance, lineage, vector stores, embeddings, and data quality.
• Ability to build good-enough web and mobile front ends and understand the platform as one system.
• Fluency with AI-assisted engineering, including context engineering, tool selection, code review, evals, golden datasets, structured outputs, and fallback paths.
• Consulting, commercial, and political judgement; ability to explain technical outcomes to COO, CTO, CIO, and CEO stakeholders.
• Clear communication, independent decision-making, mentoring ability, financial responsibility, constructive disagreement, and willingness to work in client environments on-site.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible working with hybrid and remote options.
• Occasional travel to client sites or hirify.global offices in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London, and Bulgaria.
• Flexibility over rigid rules, with focus on impact rather than activity.
• Investment in professional and personal growth.
• Supportive, friendly, diverse culture with adjustments and support available during the application process.

Hiring process

• Call with the Talent Acquisition Team.
• Role-specific capability interview.
• Depending on the role, a short presentation, practical or technical task, or values-focused conversation may be required.