Location: Portugal

Department: Engineering

Employment: Full time

About YLD:

Everything we do is to empower our clients to move forward. Our purpose is to help our clients develop the capabilities they need to outperform their competitors. Our success is a consequence of ensuring our clients are successful. Our company is built on extraordinary people; we aim to attract, inspire, develop and retain them. YLD is a software engineering and design consultancy; we create digital capabilities for our clients that last beyond our engagement. We have offices in London, Lisbon, Porto.

About the role:

As a Software Engineer, you’ll be part of a client team building innovative products. We expect you to be curious, passionate, driven, and enthusiastic. You’ll be proficient at problem-solving, and crafting scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant architectures. You’ll be an effective communicator and a team player. You and your team will move in a fast-paced engineering environment, achieving outstanding results and delivering exciting projects.

About you:

A YLD Software Engineering Consultant is a highly skilled developer who exemplifies the highest standard in software engineering and enjoys sharing their knowledge and experience with others.

You’ll have the opportunity to build and deliver software within some interesting projects in terms of the product and methodology. We work in an Agile environment (Scrum) with a test-first mindset (actually, writing code without tests should be unthinkable). We are also big advocates of pair programming and nothing is released until we have a code review.

You have a real passion for problem-solving and are an active learner who gets excited by working collaboratively with those around you.

Your day-to-day responsibilities will look like this:

• Crafting excellent products! As an AI Engineer, you will be building new AI-powered features that meet the needs of our clients' customers, as well as improving their Digital Platform with intelligent capabilities;
• Continuously delivering changes to products including AI model integrations, prompt optimisations, and system improvements, as we push for a full CI/CD model;
• Working closely with your team, regularly collaborating on both traditional engineering and AI initiatives, to continually push yourselves to build better, smarter systems;
• Participating in regular show and tells to promote your work — from AI experiments to production deployments — to both your department and the wider company;
• Joining our clients’ internal events, including meeting external speakers, going to quiz nights, etc.

You’ll have the following skills and experience:

Core Programming & AI

• Proven strong experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python
• Advanced GenAI/LLM expertise: RAG, embeddings, vector search, prompt engineering, evals, guardrails, caching, chaining, function calling, etc
• Fine-tuning expertise: LoRA/QLoRA, instruction tuning, RLHF, domain adaptation, and custom model training
• Agentic architecture design: multi-agent systems, tool orchestration, planning/reasoning frameworks, memory systems, and agent coordination patterns
• Eval systems: automated evals, human feedback loops, benchmarking, A/B testing, safety testing, hallucination detection, and performance metrics
• Experience with LLM frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, LiteLLM, CrewAI, Mastra, etc) and API integrations (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.)

Infrastructure & DevOps

• CI/CD pipelines and IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK)
• Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) for GenAI workloads and API management
• Containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) for AI applications
• LLM hosting and inference optimisation (vLLM, TGI, local deployment)

Data & Databases

• Vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, Qdrant) and traditional databases (PostgreSQL, Neo4j)
• Data pipeline design for RAG and knowledge ingestion
• Real-time data streaming and processing
• Document processing and embedding generation workflows

Frontend & APIs

• React or modern UI frameworks
• API design for LLM services and conversational interfaces
• Multiple protocols (HTTP, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets, MCP)
• Real-time chat and streaming response handling

Performance & Reliability

• Building high-performance, scalable AI applications
• LLM cost optimisation, token management, and caching strategies
• Performance monitoring, observability, and debugging production AI systems
• Comprehensive testing: unit, integration, AI behaviour, security, accessibility

You’ll be:

• Self-motivated, proactive and always looking for ways to improve and develop yourself;
• A good communicator, both in writing and verbally. You’ll be able to explain technical ideas and concepts in business-friendly language;
• Detail oriented;
• Used to working in a team-oriented, collaborative environment;
• Comfortable with experimentation, iteration, and managing uncertainty in AI systems;
• Analytical and problem-solving oriented;
• Ethical thinker who considers the broader implications of AI implementations;
• A genuine believer in diversity and fairness.

As well as the chance to work with a forward-thinking, ethical, and fun group of people, you’ll also get:

• Company Private Health care
• Enhanced fully paid maternity and paternity leave for up to 6 months
• 25 days annual holiday (excluding Public Holidays)
• €2000 annual allowance for Training/Conferences
• €300 annual allowance for additional hardware
• Wellbeing & Performance Support via Oli including Therapy and Coaching
• Discretionary Bonus (depending on Company performance and results)
• Company laptop
• Generous referral schemes

Our typical Recruitment Process looks like this:

• 1st Interview with someone from the Talent team (30/45 mins)
• Technical Interview with our Senior Developers (1h30)

We live and breathe our values, and know you will too:

• Growing every day
• Including everyone
• Relationships built on honesty and ethics
• Inspiring solutions
• Winning together

We’re an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity of all kinds. We don’t discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, age, marital status, or disability status. We also offer a remote-first working environment, meaning that flexible working and work-life balance come as standard for all employees.

Job Summary:

• At Talkdesk, our Engineering team follows a micro-service architecture approach to build the next generation of Talkdesk, with vertical teams responsible for all the decisions under their services. Through our Agile Coaches, we promote agile and collaborative practices and pair programming and we won’t let a single line of code reach production without peer code reviews. We strongly believe that the only true authority stems from knowledge, not from the position and we always treat others with respect, deference, and patience.
• Do you love APIs, databases, messaging, and open source? Do you crave great challenges that will make you feel awesome once you solve them? We're looking for software engineers like you to join a team of amazing developers that is completely disrupting an industry.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Work independently as well as in small teams to develop the best product on the market
• Implement a scalable, stable, and user-friendly product that can handle our current capacity and handle future growth
• Work in a modern agile software engineering environment (with source code control GIT, dev/stage/prod release cycle, extensive testing, and continuous deployment)
• Solve challenging technical problems and put your skills to the test every day
• Develop and maintain microservices and APIs
• Engage with the Product team and other engineering teams across clusters and Business Units  to help to ensure the solutions the team is building are fulfilling all the requirements

• Influence a growing team while acting as a technical guide—speaking conceptually, documenting architecturally, and being hands-on with code
• Design scalable solutions using code to support business functions and product goals, navigating platform limitations effectively
• Design and implement integrations between Talkdesk and external systems using APIs, middleware, and custom development, ensuring data integrity and security

Qualifications:

• BS/MS Degree in Computer Science, Applied Math, or an Engineering area
• 5+ years of experience in Software Development, especially in cloud-based applications
• Strong experience with the design and development of web applications
• Strong object-oriented programming skills and experience with cloud databases
• Proficiency with Kotlin, Java, and Spring Boot
• Deep understanding of the design and development of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA, API) and Event driven Architectures
• Experience with microservices architecture, APIs, message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Experience with one or more storage technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch)
• Experience scaling global web applications
• Advocate for automated testing, continuous integration
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines and Product development
• Passion for producing clean, standards-compliant, secure code
• Be fearless about learning new technologies and technical approaches to application development
• Good written and spoken English

Our mission is to improve developers’ experience by giving them the tools to manage the entire software lifecycle and to be self-sufficient. 

To help with this we are building our own internal PaaS using the latest technologies like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Kotlin and others. This platform is an important pillar in Talkdesk’s engineering effort and helps us deliver better, faster and more reliable solutions for our customers.


Responsibilities:

Design, build, harden, and maintain key infrastructure parts of our platform (from the lifecycle of the infrastructure to each one of our Kubernetes clusters)
Support the processes that enable the safe upgrade and update of each component of our compute infrastructure
Work with  GitOps industry-leading tools such as Spacelift and/or Atlantis
Help automate safe deployment practices by using industry-leading tools such as GitHub Actions,  ArgoCD, Argo Rollouts, Helm Charts, etc
Help automate infrastructure provisioning and other engineering processes by working on automations built on top of an engineering platform written in GitHub Actions
Coach and up-skill other engineering team members
Solve challenging technical problems and put your skills to the test every day; see an immediate impact of your work and the value you've created for other engineers
Automate every aspect of our infrastructure to remove as much human intervention as possible
Develop effective tooling, alerts, and responses to both identify and address reliability risks
Drive and promote protocols on production readiness and operational excellence
Partner with product engineering teams to debug production outages and carry out action items to improve the reliability of those systems
Advocate for automated testing, continuous integration and delivery, feature toggles, and progressive rollouts
Plan for the growth of Talkdesk’s infrastructure.


Skills and Qualifications: 

Understand large-scale complex systems from a reliability perspective
Passion for producing clean, standards-compliant, secure code
Bringing a developer mindset and applying it to infrastructure
Know your way around Linux/Unix systems
Experience with Kubernetes
Experience with Infrastructure as code tools like Terraform and Ansible
Experience building software with a programming language such as Java, Kotlin, Scala, or any other JVM-based languages
Experience writing scripts for automating the execution of certain tasks with a programming language like Ruby, Python, Bash, or any other scripting language
Experience with at least one relational and non-relational databases (ex.: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch)
Ability to identify time-consuming and error-prone manual tasks and then build/leverage tooling to automate them
Ability to identify root causes of instability in a large-scale distributed system across stacks


Nice to haves / Pluses: 

Experience with cloud-based solutions such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure
Experience with Go programming language


Additional Notes:
This position will follow a hybrid work model.

The Role

We are an IoT startup turning massive-scale, low-power device data into real-world impact. With a fleet of more than one million connected devices, we generate high-volume telemetry every day. We are looking for a passionate Backend Developer to help enrich, transform and distribute this data in a flexible hybrid setup combining remote and in-office work from our new office in Portugal.

You will join an interdisciplinary agile product team and contribute to the design, implementation and operation of distributed backend services. Together with your team, you will build reliable, scalable systems that process large volumes of device data and power customer-facing products.

We are looking for someone curious, pragmatic and collaborative who enjoys solving complex problems, automating repetitive tasks, and continuously improving how the team works.

Your responsibilities

• Design and implement backend services, including tests and  technical documentation
• Deploy and operate services using CI/CD best practices
• Take end-to-end ownership across the full lifecycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment and operations
• Monitor services and data streams and respond to anomalies
• Provide 3rd-level support and ensure service availability during business hours
• Review merge requests and design documents from teammates
• Participate in agile software development activities (e.g. planning meetings, reviews, retrospectives…)

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software development experience
• Strong experience with Kotlin or Java
• Solid knowledge of backend architecture, distributed systems and API design
• Experience with SQL (PostgreSQL) and/or NoSQL (DynamoDB)
• Familiarity with messaging systems (Kafka, SQS, SNS)
• Experience building and operating containerized services (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS or Fargate)
• Solid understanding of software testing (TDD is encouraged but not mandatory)
• Curious and never afraid of learning to master new tools, technologies, and methodologies
• Fluent in English

Nice to have:

• Geospatial data experience
• Gradle knowledge
• Linux / Unix shell skills

Work authorization: Applicants must be legally authorized to work in Portugal. Unfortunately, we are not able to sponsor visas for this role.

Our Backend Stack

• Kotlin / Java 
• Apache Kafka 
• SQS 
• DynamoDB 
• CockroachDB
• Gradle
• Docker
• Kubernetes