Principal Software Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer (AI): Building a conversational platform, Agent Builder, that connects production agents to real customer business data in hirify.globalsearch with an accent on service boundaries, reliability posture, and standards. Focus on translating ambiguous goals into incremental, testable action items, and championing reliability by defining error budgets and introducing testing strategies for conversational workloads.

Location: London, United Kingdom.

Company

hirify.global, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people.

What you will do

• Own the architecture for chat back-end services (Node/TypeScript), defining service boundaries, data contracts, and scalability targets.
• Lead cross-team design reviews; author ADRs and RFCs that become reference standards for AI-chat and ingestion work.
• Build and harden event-driven pipelines that capture chat telemetry, evaluation traces, and LLM feedback loops; expose them via self-service analytics endpoints.
• Champion reliability —define error budgets, introduce testing strategy, and steer incident-response playbooks for conversational workloads.
• Mentor senior and junior engineers; grow their system-design skills and foster a high-trust, low-ego culture.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Data Science to translate ambiguous goals (e.g., “multi-step reasoning with tool calling”) into incremental, testable action items.

Requirements

• 10+ years building distributed, production SaaS services—at least 5 years leading large-scale Node/TypeScript or similar back-end stacks.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems fundamentals —shard routing, consensus, eventual consistency, back-pressure, and circuit-breaker patterns.
• Demonstrated success designing high-throughput, low-latency APIs (gRPC / REST / WebSocket)—including streaming responses and resumable sessions.
• Hands-on experience with observability: OpenTelemetry, log/metric pipelines, synthetic checks, and SLO dashboards.
• Exposure to LLM tooling (LangChain/LangGraph, OpenAI function calls, vector-search, RAG orchestration) and enthusiasm for advancing GenAI architectures.
• Clear, persuasive written communication—your ADRs and RFCs set the standard others emulate.

Nice to have

• Contribution history to Kibana or other large SPAs; ability to prototype front-end dashboards when it unblocks back-end work.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary.
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles.
• Generous number of vacation days each year.
• Increase your impact - We match up to $2000 (or local currency equivalent) for financial donations and service.
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love.
• Embracing parenthood with a minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave.