Staff Engineer (Backend experience with AI transformation)

Location: Remote EU, must be based in the EU already

About the Client

A fast growing digital business with a large consumer base and a engineering team that has outgrown the way it currently works. Leadership has created a new function dedicated to changing how products get designed, built, tested and shipped, and this is the first engineering hire into it.

Role Overview

You will report directly to the CIO and help shape the function from the ground up. There is a mandate and a direction, but no spec. You will help write it.

The goal is an engineering organisation where AI agents carry a real share of the work across design, QA, testing and product delivery, and where engineers, and the people around them, take on broader ownership and ship as product builders.

This is a hands-on role. You will prototype quickly, work in the codebase, and unblock hard problems yourself, while also setting direction, running design reviews and making the case to leadership in plain language.

Responsibilities

• Own the roadmap for introducing AI agents into the engineering workflow, from design through to release
• Build and roll out agentic QA and test automation to widen coverage and catch regressions earlier
• Put AI into the delivery pipeline itself: code review, testing and deployment gates in GitHub or GitLab
• Help engineers and adjacent roles move into broader product ownership, with the tooling and coaching to back it up
• Make pragmatic build-versus-buy calls on AI tooling, weighing cost, latency, data privacy and vendor risk
• Set standards for how AI-assisted systems are designed, tested, monitored and rolled back
• Work closely with engineering leadership, product and data to find where AI creates real business value
• Mentor senior and mid level engineers and raise the technical bar across the team

Required Skills and Experience

• Staff or Principal level scope: you have set technical direction, not only delivered against it
• Proven experience using AI agents to change how an engineering team builds and ships, with measurable results you can talk through
• Experience getting engineers, including sceptical ones, to adopt new ways of working
• Strong hands-on engineering background in a statically typed language such as Scala, Kotlin, Java, Go or Rust
• Solid grounding in event-driven, distributed systems (Kafka or equivalent) and an understanding of how they fail
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker in production
• Good judgement on build-versus-buy decisions for AI platforms and tooling
• Comfort working from a mandate rather than a spec, and working directly with a senior executive
• Professional-level English, written and spoken

No Sponsorship for this position