Principal AI Engineer in London

Gravitee is a 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader, on a mission to govern the world’s intelligence. We deliver the industry’s most advanced platform for Any API, Any Event, and Any AI Agent, trusted by global leaders like Michelin, Roche, and Blue Yonder.

The Mission: We are the first to bridge traditional API Management with the new frontier of AI Agent Security.

The Momentum: A high-growth Leader - combining market credibility with startup speed.

The DNA: We hire people who Hold Nothing Back - passionate builders who want to redefine digital infrastructure. Don’t just watch the AI revolution. Build the infrastructure that controls and secures it.

The Role: AI is reshaping how organisations build, ship, and scale digital products and APIs are the connective tissue that makes it possible. As a Director of AI Strategy & Engineering, you’ll play a critical role in shaping our Builder Experience and lead the team responsible for executing it. You will lead a squad of DevEx and Platform Engineers to build an AI-augmented ecosystem that optimises every phase of the lifecycle, from product ideation to production deployment. As a founding AI leader, you will own the end-to-end playbook for operationalising intelligence, building both the technological infrastructure and the team culture from the ground up in a dedicated, greenfield environment.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Team Leadership & Management
  • Build the Squad: scale a high-performing team of Developer Experience and Platform Engineers.
  • Mentorship: Foster a culture of technical excellence and user empathy, ensuring your team view internal Product Managers and Developers as their primary customers.
  • Resource Planning: Balance the roadmap between long-term R&D (e.g., experimenting with new LLM agents) and immediate tactical fixes that unblock the engineering organisation.
• Strategy & Vision
  • Define the roadmap for the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) with a "Zero-Friction" mindset.
  • Drive the adoption of AI-native workflows by bridging the gap between cutting-edge LLM capabilities and the operational realities of a high-speed development environment.
• Platform Architecture & Context Engineering
  • Lead the technical implementation of the platform. This involves integrating LLMs into our version control, issue tracking (Jira/Linear), and documentation tools.
  • Own Context Management: Ensure our internal AI tools have the right context (codebase knowledge, historical PRDs, architecture decision records) to provide accurate, hallucination-free assistance.
• Workflow Acceleration
  • For Product: Build tools that ingest user feedback and assist in drafting rigorous Product Requirement Documents (PRDs).
  • For Engineering: Integrate coding assistants that go beyond autocomplete, enabling entire scaffolding generation based on the PRDs created in the previous step.
• Metrics & Reporting
  • Define and track the "Physics of Gravitee": Speed, Velocity, and Quality.
  • Report on AI Adoption: usage rates of internal tools, acceptance rates of AI-generated code/specs.
  • Report on Productivity: DORA metrics (Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes) and "Time-to-Spec." Your impact will be visible, measurable, and global.

Essential Skills:

• 3+ years of experience managing engineering teams (DevEx, Platform, or Tooling teams preferred). You have a track record of hiring great talent and helping them grow.
• 7+ years in software engineering with a recent, deep focus on Generative AI and LLMs.
• You understand that "building" involves writing specs just as much as writing code. You have empathy for Product Managers and Designers.
• Deep understanding of the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle).
• Familiarity with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), Vector Databases, and Context Engineering.
• Data-Driven: You don't guess; you measure. You are comfortable defining KPIs and presenting them to executive leadership.

Who Thrives at Gravitee:

• You’ll do well here if you care deeply about quality, clarity, and impact.
• Are curious, adaptable, and excited by emerging technologies like AI.
• Take ownership and follow through.
• Value collaboration, openness, and continuous improvement.

Bonus points if you’ve worked with APIs, cloud-native platforms, AI-enabled systems, or open source, but curiosity matters most.

Life at Gravitee:

At Gravitee, we invest in humans, not just roles. You’ll get competitive medical coverage, Pension / 401k program options, stock options, 25 days holiday + in-country national holidays, 3 mental health days + wellness allowance, your birthday off, professional development budget to fuel your growth, hybrid work culture with hubs across regions, quarterly team events + annual offsite at an exciting location, and a meaningful, progressive, global company culture that is as fun as it is hardworking. Endless growth opportunities.

At Gravitee, we believe diverse perspectives make better products and stronger teams.

At Gravitee, no employee or applicant will be treated less favourably on the grounds of sex, marital status, race, color, nationality or ethnic or national origin, disability, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, pregnancy or maternity, marital or civil partner status, or religion or belief.