Senior AI Backend Engineer

Role Overview
Key Responsibilities
Backend Engineering
• Design, build, and maintain backend services and REST APIs that power customer products
• Design data models and schemas, and work with relational and other data stores as appropriate
• Apply strong software engineering and distributed systems principles to day-to-day development
• Write automated tests and maintain CI/CD pipelines for reliable, repeatable deployments
• Diagnose and resolve production issues related to latency, reliability, and data quality
AI Integration
• Integrate backend services with customer's AI Suite (Bedrock, AgentCore, SageMaker-based APIs) built and maintained by the AI Platform team
• Wire LLM, embedding, and RAG-based capabilities exposed by the AI Suite into application features
• Apply prompt engineering and function calling at the application level to build reliable AI-powered features
• Contribute to testing and quality checks for AI-driven features from a product/application perspective
Cross-Stack Contribution
• Contribute across the stack as needed, such as data pipelines, infrastructure, or frontend touchpoints, depending on team and project needs
• Partner with full stack engineers, the AI Platform team, and data teams to deliver features end-to-end
• Balance delivery speed with code quality, maintainability, and operational health
Collaboration & Growth
• Work closely with product managers and business stakeholders to translate requirements into working software
• Collaborate with the AI Platform team to stay current on AI Suite capabilities and best practices for consuming them
• Share knowledge with other engineers on backend and AI-integration best practices

• Mandatory Technical Skills
  7+ years of experience into
  Programming & Engineering
  • Python
  • REST API design and development
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Automated testing
  • Distributed systems fundamentals
  • Relational database design (e.g. PostgreSQL)
  CI/CD & Infrastructure
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • Jenkins experience is a plus
  AI Familiarity
  • Working familiarity with Generative AI / LLM concepts: RAG, embeddings, prompt engineering, function calling
  • Experience integrating applications with LLM or AI platform APIs (e.g. AWS Bedrock or equivalent); deep agentic architecture or model training experience is not required
  • Comfortable reasoning about prompt behavior and AI output quality from an application/product perspective
  Cloud Platforms
  • Working experience with AWS (or equivalent cloud platform)
  • Exposure to core AWS services such as Lambda, API Gateway, S3, and CloudWatch is a plus
  Data Platforms
  • Databricks experience is a plus
  Production & Operations
  • Observability (logs, metrics, tracing, alerts)
  • Monitoring and reliability engineering
  • Performance tuning and cost optimization
  Security
  • Experience implementing AuthN/AuthZ (OAuth2/OIDC, SSO), RBAC, and secrets management in production applications
  Soft Skills
  • Strong communication skills; comfortable presenting technical recommendations directly to engineering and business stakeholders
  Nice to Haves
  Domain
  • Experience working within the financial services domain is preferred
  • Prior experience across Capital Markets, Digital Assets/Crypto, or AI infrastructure is highly desirable
  • Awareness of the regulatory and compliance landscape relevant to financial services technology delivery
  AI & Product
  • Experience building applications on top of LLM/agentic AI platforms (e.g. AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, or equivalent)
  • Familiarity with vector databases and embeddings (e.g. pgvector) for AI-powered search/retrieval features
  • Ability to evaluate AI feature quality from a product/UX lens (accuracy, latency, hallucination handling, graceful degradation), distinct from model-level evaluation owned by the AI Platform team

Why Version 1?

At Version 1, we believe in providing our employees with a comprehensive benefits package that prioritises their wellbeing, professional growth, and financial stability.

• Share in our success with our Quarterly Performance-Related Profit Share Scheme, where employees collectively benefit from a share of our company's profits
• Strong Career Progression & mentorship coaching through our Strength in Balance & Leadership schemes with a dedicated quarterly Pathways Career Development programme
• Flexible/remote working, Version 1 is tremendously understanding of life events and people’s individual circumstances and offer flexibility to help achieve a healthy work life balance
• Financial Wellbeing initiatives including; Pension, Private Healthcare Cover, Life Assurance, Financial advice and an Employee Discount scheme
• Employee Wellbeing schemes including Gym Discounts, Bike to Work, Fitness classes, Mindfulness Workshops, Employee Assistance Programme and much more. Generous holiday allowance, enhanced maternity/paternity leave, marriage/civil partnership leave and special leave policies
• Educational assistance, incentivised certifications, and accreditations, including AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat
• Reward schemes including Version 1’s Annual Excellence Awards & ‘Call-Out’ platform.
• Environment, Social and Community First initiatives allow you to get involved in local fundraising and development opportunities as part of fostering our diversity, inclusion and belonging schemes.

And many more exciting benefits… drop us a note to find out more.

Version 1 is an equal opportunities employer.

We are committed to building a diverse, inclusive and respectful workplace where everyone feels valued and able to thrive. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and lived experiences, and we value the different perspectives people bring including those shaped by disability and neurodiversity.

We want every candidate to have a positive and accessible recruitment experience. If you need reasonable adjustments at any stage of the process, please contact your recruiter at Version 1. We will consider all requests carefully, respectfully and confidentially.

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