Senior AI Engineer

Senior AI Engineer - Payments & Financial Technology Dublin, Ireland Hybrid Who We Are Fulcrum Digital is a global AI-first enterprise transformation company with over 25 years of experience. We partner with enterprises across financial services, insurance, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, higher education, and logistics to move from AI experimentation to scalable business outcomes. Fulcrum Digital works with over 100 global clients, including Fortune 500 enterprises, combining deep industry expertise with capabilities in enterprise AI, digital engineering, cloud modernisation, platform integration, and generative AI. The Role This is your chance to build the AI that powers how the world pays. We're looking for a technically strong Senior AI Engineer to join Fulcrum Digital's engineering team on one of our top client engagements - a global leader in payments technology embedding LLM-driven and agentic capabilities into the platforms business users everywhere rely on to make faster, smarter, data-driven decisions. You'll be at the center of applied AI innovation in financial services, designing and shipping production-grade AI systems, from retrieval-augmented generation to autonomous agentic workflows, that scale to serve some of the world's biggest markets. Based in Dublin, Ireland, with a hybrid working arrangement. You'll help shape architecture for AI-powered services, spanning LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows, alongside core non-functional requirements like scalability, performance, security, and reliability. You'll work closely with cross-functional teams to solve complex technical challenges, lead team-level design, and ship intelligent, data-driven capabilities using Java, Databricks, LLM frameworks, and modern data technologies. It's a small, agile, high-trust team, where every engineer owns outcomes end-to-end, from ideation through production. Why This Role Build production AI systems - LLMs, RAG, agentic workflows - inside mission-critical payments infrastructure Shape how applied AI gets deployed responsibly at enterprise scale High-autonomy team where your technical decisions carry real weight Grow with Fulcrum Digital's expanding footprint across Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI), and its broader enterprise AI practice What You'll Do Lead team-level design for AI-powered services, including LLM and agent architecture, RAG pipelines, tool-calling integrations, data flows, and nonfunctional requirements such as scalability, reliability, performance, security, and operability Design, build, and productionise AI-powered features, including LLM integrations, RAG/retrieval systems, and agentic workflows using frameworks such as LangChain and LlamaIndex Implement agentic workflow patterns, including planning/reasoning loops, memory management, grounding, evaluation frameworks, safety mechanisms, and human-in-the-loop design Develop and optimise data-intensive applications and analytics capabilities using Databricks, Spark/PySpark, and related technologies to process and deliver data at scale Serve as a hands-on technical contributor, designing, coding, testing, debugging, and delivering production-quality software across the full engineering lifecycle Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across services, APIs, data pipelines, and AI/LLM workloads Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate business requirements into scalable, AI-driven technical solutions Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through technical guidance, pairing, code reviews, documentation, and knowledge sharing Improve engineering quality through code reviews, design reviews, automated testing, secure coding practices, observability, evaluation of AI systems, and production readiness Troubleshoot complex issues across application, service, API, data, cloud, and AI/LLM layers, driving root cause analysis and implementing durable solutions Requirements Must-Have Java, Spring Boot, RESTful APIs, Databricks, Spark/PySpark for data pipelines Hands-on experience building AI-powered products using LLMs, RAG/retrieval systems, orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex), and tool-calling/function-calling patterns Strong grasp of agentic workflow concepts, including planning/reasoning loops, memory management, grounding, evaluation frameworks, safety mechanisms, and human-in-the-loop design 6+ years of software engineering experience building scalable, distributed systems and cloud-native applications in an agile environment Proven ability to lead team-level design, evaluate technical trade-offs, and translate business needs into secure, maintainable solutions Strong collaboration, communication, and problem-solving skills, comfortable working through ambiguity Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience Nice-to-Have Exposure to TypeScript/React and SQL Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure), containerisation (Docker), and Kubernetes Experience with strategic technology partnerships or ecosystem work