Senior Applied AI Engineer at Pleo – LLMOps & RAG in Columbus

About Pleo

Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike — with a vision to help all businesses 'go beyond'.

The word 'Pleo' actually means 'more than you'd expect', and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.

Now, we're at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can't say we've got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that's half the fun! What we can say is that we're a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together.

About the Role

This is an exciting opportunity to help shape how Pleo builds AI-powered product features, working alongside software engineers, data engineers and data scientists to take ideas from prototype to production. Pleo has over 40,000 customers and a decade of unique spend data — an incredible foundation to build on. Your mission will be to harness this data to create real product value.

Please note: applications will be open until 1st September 2026 at 09:00 CEST. We will not review any application before the window is closed, so please take all the time you need to submit a great application!

Who You'll Be Working With and Reporting To

You'll be reporting to the Senior Manager for Data & AI Products and will be one of the first hires in the team. Rest assured, you will not be working solo! You will work very closely with other Engineers and Data Scientists, each bringing distinctive skills while you bring applied AI engineering and data context. Together, the team covers the full chain from data to shipped product.

Your core focus is on building and shipping AI-powered features, with a strong collaborative element across Product Engineering, AI Platform, and Data & ML Platform teams.

What You'll Be Doing

As a Senior Applied AI Engineer you will:

• Build and ship AI-powered product features for Pleo's customers, owning outcomes end-to-end for a scoped area.
• Design and build end-to-end RAG systems for specific product use cases: chunking strategies, embedding model selection, retrieval optimisation, and quality evaluation.
• Own the full AI-product lifecycle: prompt design, context and state management, agentic loops, output parsing, edge case handling, and safe production deployment.
• Build evaluation datasets and automated eval pipelines that give the team confidence in AI feature quality before and after changes.
• Instrument AI features for production observability: logging, drift detection, quality monitoring, and alerting.
• Collaborate with Product and Design to scope AI features from first principles — you are a co-author of what gets built, not just an implementer of specs.
• Partner with our GenAI Platform team to identify infrastructure needs and champion adoption of platform tooling.
• Support other engineers through reviews, pairing, and pragmatic technical leadership on the projects you lead.

What You Bring

You will thrive in this role if you have:

• Proven experience shipping customer-facing AI features using LLMs — beyond prototype stage and into real production systems with real users.
• Deep practical experience with RAG system design and the full retrieval pipeline: embedding models, vector databases, chunking, hybrid search, re-ranking.
• Experience building and operating evaluation frameworks for LLM-based systems; you have a systematic approach to measuring quality.
• Strong Python engineering — your code is production-grade, tested, and maintainable.
• Experience building APIs and data retrieval pipelines that feed context into AI systems.
• Enough data intuition to reason about data quality, schema, and retrieval architecture without needing a dedicated data engineer beside you at all times.
• Experience with agentic system patterns: tool use, multi-step orchestration, error handling in LLM workflows.
• Familiarity with public cloud providers (AWS, GCP).
• We operate a polyglot platform, with components written in Kotlin and Python. While this role is Python-focused, you will need from time to time to contribute in a Kotlin stack, so being open to that is important.

Why This Role Is (or Isn't) a Good Fit

This role is a good fit for you if:

• You have strong product instincts and build with the user in mind. You understand that a model is only as good as the problem it solves.
• You have moved past prototyping and have a deep understanding of the realities of LLMOps, data retrieval, prompt and context engineering, as well as model evaluation in production.
• You don't just call APIs — you understand the data feeding the AI system and can reason about data quality, architecture, and retrieval without needing a dedicated data engineer beside you at all times.

This role is not a good fit for you if:

• You are primarily interested in model research or algorithm development. This role is about shipping working AI features to production.
• You need fully defined specs and a groomed backlog to operate effectively. We expect you to discover and define the problem alongside Product and Design.
• You cannot explain AI trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders. You will regularly work with Product Managers, Designers, and business leaders who need to understand what is and isn't possible.

How You'll Develop in This Role

In your first 6 months at Pleo, you'll:

• Familiarise yourself with our codebase, tooling and roadmap.
• Partner with our Principal Engineer to define and own our approach to AI feature development.
• Contribute to shaping the roadmap for tooling and features developed by our GenAI Core team.
• Collaborate with Product and Data teams to ship a first feature to production.

We're committed to helping you develop your career, whether that means taking on bigger projects, stepping into leadership, or acquiring new skills!

The Location

Please note: We can hire on a remote, hybrid or in-person set-up in any of the locations listed on the advert, but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work.

We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

Benefits

• Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
• Lunch is on us for your work days — enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office.
• Comprehensive private healthcare — depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis.
• 25 days of holiday + your public holidays.
• Both hybrid and fully remote working options available.
• Access to MyndUp for free mental health and well-being support.
• Paid parental leave — we want to make sure that you don't have to compromise your family due to work.

The Interview Process

We want to ensure you are set up for success and understand what will be expected of you. If your application is successful, our interview process is as follows:

1. Intro call: A 30-minute chat with our Talent Partner to discuss the role and your background.
2. Technical screening: A 15–30 minute call with our Talent Partner to check your knowledge of key technical topics.
3. System design interview: A 75-minute practical session with our engineers focusing on scoping and designing an AI feature.
4. Live coding interview: A 75-minute practical session with our engineers focusing on implementing your solution.
5. Hiring Manager interview: A 60-minute conversation to deep dive into your knowledge and experience.
6. Final interview: A leadership interview focusing on your behavioural, communication and collaboration skills.

Tips for a Successful Application

• CV writing and content: We receive a lot of CVs, and many are AI-generated. We love seeing people leverage AI, but without human intervention, these CVs can become generic. What we're really looking for is the specific details of real impact that only you know from your previous experience. A top tip: use the "Achieved X, as measured by Y, by doing Z" formula (credit: Laszlo Bock, ~2014). Including links to your previous companies' websites is also a huge help.
• Application care: Every single application is reviewed by a human because we believe candidates' efforts should be matched by an equal level of care. Read and answer the application questions carefully — they make a huge difference in our decision-making process.
• Profile to role fit: This is neither a research-driven nor a traditional data or software engineering role. We're looking for someone with proven experience shipping customer-facing AI products who can operate at Senior level in a SaaS organisation.

About Your Application

• English first. Since it's our company language, please submit your application in English.
• A fair look for everyone. Our talent team reads every single application. We only accept applications through our system — our support team can't pass on calls or emails.
• Diversity drives us. We can only reach our goals if our team reflects the world around us. That starts with you hitting apply, even if you don't tick every single box.
• Interview at your best. If you have any accessibility requirements or need a specific format, email [email protected]. We'll design a process that works for you.
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• Applying for multiple roles? Nothing is stopping you — we assess every role independently. Make sure you can explain why your interest and experience are right for each specific role.
• Reapplying. If you're applying for the same role again, please wait six months from your last decision before hitting submit.