Staff AI Engineer, Payments Intelligence

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff AI Engineer, Payments Intelligence based in Portugal.

As a Staff AI Engineer, you’ll serve as a senior technical leader responsible for shaping the architecture and delivery of AI systems at the core of a global payments platform. You’ll design and build production-grade AI agents, LLM pipelines, and intelligence products that solve complex payment and operational challenges. Your work will span agentic AI, conversational experiences, data intelligence, automation, evaluation, and AI safety. You’ll operate in a highly technical, hands-on environment where reliability, scalability, latency, and responsible AI are critical. You’ll collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and senior engineering teams while mentoring other engineers and setting technical direction. This is an opportunity to have significant influence over how AI-powered payment products are designed, evaluated, and deployed globally.

Accountabilities

• Lead the architecture and technical direction of AI agents and Payments Intelligence systems, including multi-step agents, tool use, orchestration, memory, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Design, develop, and productionize LLM and agentic AI systems engineered for reliability, scalability, low latency, and high-quality outcomes.
• Build intelligent conversational experiences capable of engaging customers dynamically across channels such as phone and messaging platforms, including multilingual interactions across 70+ languages.
• Develop AI solutions that retrieve payment information, recover revenue from failed transactions, automate internal operations, support customers, and generate actionable merchant insights.
• Establish rigorous approaches to AI evaluation, observability, safety, and guardrails to ensure reliable behavior in a compliance-sensitive, multi-market environment.
• Architect data and intelligence products that transform complex payment data into actionable insights for merchants.
• Define responsible practices for using AI-assisted development tools throughout the design, evaluation, and deployment lifecycle.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and senior engineering stakeholders to deliver complex, cross-functional AI initiatives.
• Mentor engineers, promote strong engineering standards, and raise the technical bar for AI development across the organization.
• Own technical outcomes from system architecture through production deployment, with a focus on measurable impact and continuous improvement.

Requirements

• Extensive software engineering experience with a proven track record of building and shipping production LLM or AI-agent systems.
• Deep expertise in agentic AI systems, including multi-step agents, tool use, orchestration, memory, and RAG.
• Strong LLM application development skills, including prompt engineering, evaluation, testing, and safety guardrails.
• Advanced Python skills for AI/ML development, combined with strong backend engineering capabilities in Go and/or Kotlin.
• Experience with model serving, LLM inference, and cloud infrastructure for running AI workloads in production, ideally with AWS or a comparable platform.
• Hands-on experience with AI evaluation and observability platforms such as LangFuse, LangSmith, Braintrust, or MLflow.
• Strong knowledge of automated testing and CI/CD practices for reliable production systems.
• Proven technical leadership experience, including mentoring engineers, defining technical vision, and delivering complex cross-team projects.
• Advanced written and spoken English proficiency.
• Experience with fine-tuning, RLHF, or model customization is advantageous.
• Familiarity with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, or FAISS and embedding-based retrieval.
• Experience building agent workflows using MCP servers or modern agent frameworks.
• Knowledge of conversational AI, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and multilingual AI systems is a plus.
• Previous experience in payments, fintech, or another highly regulated environment is preferred.
• Experience operating multi-tenant AI platforms or managing GPU and AI resources at scale is beneficial.
• Familiarity with data pipelines and orchestration tools such as Airflow or Prefect, and data warehouses such as Databricks, Snowflake, or BigQuery, is a plus.
• Spanish proficiency is considered an additional advantage.
• Strong ownership, curiosity, problem-solving ability, and a hands-on approach to technical leadership.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation.
• Fully remote working environment with the flexibility to work from anywhere.
• One-time home office allowance to help you create an effective workspace.
• Work equipment provided.
• Stock options.
• Health plan available wherever you are.
• Flexible days off.
• Language, professional, and personal development courses.
• Opportunity to work on advanced AI and agentic systems operating at significant production scale.
• International and distributed environment with collaboration across multiple markets and technical disciplines.