Principal Engineer (AI)

Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland; hybrid, with two days per week in the Belfast office. Candidates must be based in Northern Ireland.

Salary: £85,000–£95,000 plus benefits.

Company

Join a global financial technology organisation whose platforms support millions of businesses in more than 175 countries.

What you will do

• Build AI skills, agents, and workflows that engineering teams can use immediately.
• Evaluate AI tools and practices for wider adoption and integrate them safely into CI/CD, testing, and release processes.
• Lead small tiger teams with architects, product managers, and subject matter experts to solve engineering problems.
• Measure developer productivity using clear baseline efficiency metrics.
• Define standards for secure and responsible AI use in a highly regulated environment.
• Coach engineers and turn senior-leadership ideas into deliverable plans.

Requirements

• 10–15 years of hands-on software engineering experience, with continued involvement in coding.
• Demonstrated experience driving AI adoption in a real engineering team.
• Strong working knowledge of Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, agents, MCP, and context engineering.
• End-to-end understanding of the SDLC, from design through CI/CD and production.
• Quality-first judgment and the ability to explain and influence decisions from engineer to director level.
• Based in Northern Ireland and able to work from the Belfast office two days per week.
• This role is for software engineering leadership and is not suited to data science or ML research profiles.

Nice to have

• Financial services or other regulated-industry experience.
• Experience establishing developer productivity or DORA metrics.
• Hands-on experience with LLM frameworks or evaluation tooling.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working with two office days per week in Belfast.
• Access to Copilot and multiple LLMs with room for experimentation.
• Senior-leadership support for practical AI transformation rather than isolated pilots.
• Work reaching platforms used by millions of businesses worldwide.
• Benefits package and a fast hiring process with no coding test.

Hiring process

• Contact Chanel Gillen through LinkedIn or email chanel@hirify.globalpeople.com for a confidential discussion.
• No coding test is required; the organisation aims to move quickly, with a potential start within weeks.