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.

What you will be doing:

We are building cutting edge solutions that help reveal the truth for a safer world and we are looking for Machine Learning Engineers to help us do this! You will engineer machine learning models, tooling and data pipelines for our linked data ecosystem and work on models to determine whether the people and companies our clients are screening and monitoring are linked to financial crime, and to improve recall while reducing noise in the results. 

As a Junior Machine Learning Engineer, you will:

• Build/train and productionize machine learning models for your squad
• Build capabilities to monitor model performance and feature drift
• Where appropriate re-use public models to reduce time to value
• Collaborate with other software engineers in a cross functional team to design and implement intelligent services
• Be mentored by senior engineers to design solutions with scale, transparency and ease of operation in mind, and to write maintainable, performant and well-tested code in Python
• Work with mid and senior engineers to integrate ML models into new and existing data pipelines to drive positive impact for CA’s customers, including feature engineering as well as building APIs and consuming and producing event streams as inputs and outputs of models

Our Tech Stack:

• Our technology stack is designed to run on public cloud architectures, notably AWS and GCP. 
• Development is organized around Kotlin and Python for our backend languages and TypeScript/ES6+React for our frontend stack. 
• We make substantial use of relational database technologies, notably Postgres, and also use of  a distributed SQL database as Yugabyte
• We also use an event-sourced model powered by Kafka for our communication bus and gRPC for our intra-service communication protocol. 
• For our data and AI teams, experience in machine learning development and very large-scale columnar data stores (e.g. Apache HBase, Databricks) is key, as well as experience with large-scale data streaming technologies such as Apache Spark, graph databases (e.g. Neo4j, AWS Neptune, TigerGraph)
• We use modern observability solutions built on Grafana Cloud, and deploy our code using ArgoCD

We have a strong emphasis on engineering excellence and strive to ship the best possible code and the best possible solutions to our customers.

About you:

As a Junior Machine Learning Engineer, you will have:

• Demonstrable python software development skills
• A degree with some mathematical content and formal machine learning education either subsequent to your degree (e.g. as a masters) or as a core part of your degree
• Demonstrable experience of building ML models using a range of machine learning algorithms and techniques either from previous jobs or personal and academic projects 

Education: 

• BSc/BA degree in computer science, engineering or related discipline OR relevant years of experience in required skills.

What’s in it for you? 

• Equity as we want you to have a part of what we are building 
• Private medical insurance designed to keep you ensuring peace of mind while you excel in your career
• Unlimited Time Off Policy - A work-life balance and focus on our well-being are critical to keeping us performing at our best 
• We embrace a hybrid approach that requires employees to be in the office for two days a week. We strongly believe that this approach fosters collaboration and enables the building of meaningful relationships
• You will also get a new starter budget to kit out your home office 
• Opportunity to work on innovative projects with smart-minded people keen to share their knowledge and continuously improve 
• Annual learning budget (prorated based on start date) to drive your performance and career development