Applied AI Engineer, Operations Automation
First seen by Alion on Sep 28, 2026.
We're looking for an experienced Applied AI Engineer to join our Growth team and help build operations automation systems for our global mobility platform. If you're excited about applying machine learning to customer support, document verification, and fraud detection challenges across Bolt's 200M+ customers, you'll find plenty of impactful work here.
About us
With over 200 million customers across 50+ countries and 850+ cities, Bolt is one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Europe and Africa — powered by 4.5+ million partners on our platform, 4,000+ employees globally. And it's all thanks to our people.
We believe in creating an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, regardless of race, colour, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, or ability.
Our ultimate goal is to make cities for people, not cars — and we need your help on this mission!
About the role
Every new customer and order at Bolt can trigger an operational decision: a refund, a document check, an account review, a ruling in a dispute. Our teams already use AI on top of existing processes to make them faster and more accurate. Many of those processes need a redesign from the ground up, and a design that gets better with every decision it makes.
You start with customer support for all users, then move to document verification & fraud detection. After that, any process with high decision volume and a recorded outcome is in scope.
You are hands-on. You ship the product and own the result.
Main tasks and responsibilities
- Redesign processes. Mine an area's systems of record, interview the people who run it, and decide which steps become software, agents or human checkpoints.
- Define what great looks like. Turn real cases and human decisions into test sets, and turn every new failure into a regression test.
- Build checks that are hard to game. Calibrate LLM judges against human labels, keep them apart from programmatic checks, and guard cost and payouts.
- Run the improvement loop across policies, prompts, tools and models. Add fine-tuning where a better policy is not enough.
- Own the rollout gates. Decide what ships, run the A/B test, and feed the live result back into the test sets.
- Codify what works so other teams can run it without you.
You are measured on how many decisions you automate while raising their quality.
About you
- You come from software engineering, ML or data science, and you have shipped and operated a system that calls LLMs.
- You have built an evaluation suite for an LLM or agent system and used it to decide what ships.
- You have spent dozens of hours in agent traces finding where decisions went wrong, and fixed them.
- You have designed an LLM judge, measured its agreement with human labels, and fixed it when the two disagreed.
- You know how verifiers get gamed, and have caught a case of reward hacking in your work.
- You can design an A/B test, read its result, and explain to an operations lead why the offline tests predicted something different.
- You know when a rule, a classic ML model or a human beats an LLM, and you can show the cost trade-off.
- You write clearly in English. Your reports pair a ceiling estimate with a realistic one.
Nice to have:
- Hands-on post-training: RLVR, GRPO or DPO, reward modelling, LoRA etc.
- Program optimisation frameworks such as GEPA, DSPy or TextGrad.
- RL environment or gym design with programmatic grading.
- Operations automation at a marketplace, fintech or trust and safety team.
- Strong SQL, and comfort working in codebases you did not write.
This role is not for you if you want to train frontier models, need a finished spec before you start, or prefer benchmark scores to live results.
Why you'll love it here
- Accelerate your professional growth with unique career opportunities.
- Enjoy a rewarding salary and stock options, knowing that as Bolt succeeds, so do you.
- Take care of your physical and mental health with our wellness perks.
- Celebrate 5 years at Bolt with a 1-month paid sabbatical to recharge.
- Connect with colleagues at annual company events and smaller team gatherings.
- Work on-site at our Tallinn HQ, next to the operations and engineering teams whose decisions you automate.
Some perks may differ depending on your location and role.
At Bolt, using AI daily is a baseline expectation for everyone. If there's a faster, smarter way to do your work, we expect you to find it. You're still responsible for the output, so the standard stays high when using AI tools.
Experience is great, but what we really look for is drive, intelligence, and integrity. So even if you don't tick every box, please consider applying!
Everyone is welcome
Bolt is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace where all qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to race, colour, nationality, religion, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, age, or disability.
We welcome applications from all backgrounds and are happy to make reasonable accommodations throughout our hiring process. If you require any adjustments, please let us know