AI Enablement Engineer in Leatherhead

About Phorest

Would you like to create the future of a product used by thousands of businesses and millions of consumers?

Phorest Salon Software powers over 11,000 hair and beauty salons in Ireland, UK, Germany, Australia, Finland, USA, Canada, UAE and Netherlands and the platform processes 7 million appointments a month for hair and beauty consumers.

Phorest is the number 1 salon software brand for premium independent salons in those markets and our next goal is to become a platform upon which other companies can build applications for premium salons.

The Opportunity

AI is fundamentally changing how software companies operate. At Phorest, we’re investing in AI not just as a product capability, but as a core part of how we work.

We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer — AI Enablement to become a founding member of our AI Enablement team.

This is a highly autonomous hands-on Staff engineering role.

You’ll work across Phorest to identify the highest-leverage opportunities, understand how work really happens, and use AI, automation or software to create measurable business impact.

You’ll combine deep technical expertise with strong product judgement, alongside strong commercial and strategic thinking — taking ambiguous problems from discovery through experimentation and into reliable production systems.

The goal isn’t to put AI everywhere.

It’s to find where technology can create the greatest leverage, choose the right approach, prove the value it creates, and build the foundations that allow that impact to scale.

• What You’ll Do
• Set the technical direction for AI Enablement: identify and lead solutions to complex, high-leverage problems across the business and establish the engineering patterns and standards that others can build on.
• Find and deliver the biggest opportunities: work directly with functions to understand their goals and workflows, prioritise where AI Enablement can create the most value, and drive work from problem through to outcome.
• Build the right solution: rapidly prototype and deliver AI-powered tools, agents, automations or conventional software, making pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions based on value, capability, cost, security and maintainability.
• Build production systems teams can depend on: ensure critical solutions are scalable, secure, observable, reliable, maintainable and appropriately owned.
• Measuring impact: Establish a baseline before each engagement and measure the outcomes afterwards, including engineering, tooling and model costs versus the value created.

You will use this evidence to influence future investment, prioritisation and decision-making.

• Build for scale: create reusable capabilities, governance and ways of working that make future engagements faster and safer, while helping to shape and manage AI tooling, security, production use and spend across Phorest.
• Act as a multiplier: share knowledge, mentor others and help raise AI and engineering capability across the organisation.

Provide high-quality actionable feedback, establishing best practices that enable others to make good AI and technical decisions independently.

• Every engagement should ultimately answer: What changed? What did it cost? What value did it create?
• What Success Looks Like
• In your first 90 days

You will build a strong understanding of Phorest’s strategy, business model, customers, key workflows and the opportunities created by emerging AI capabilities.

You will proactively identify and prioritise the highest-leverage opportunities, build relationships across technical and non-technical functions, and establish a clear view of where AI Enablement can create meaningful strategic, commercial and organisational impact.

You will lead an initial opportunity from discovery through experimentation and into production, demonstrating measurable value.

You will also begin establishing the strategic principles, technical patterns, governance and operating model that will allow AI Enablement to scale beyond individual engagements.

Longer term

Success means building a repeatable AI Enablement model that delivers many multiples of its cost in measurable business value.

You’ll help establish the technical direction and framework that allow a growing AI Enablement team to work across multiple functions, reuse what works and continuously increase its impact.

Prove the model at the scale of one. Demonstrate the return. Scale what works.

Who You Are

We’re looking for a Staff-level engineer who combines deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, strong product judgement and practical AI experience.

• You’ll Likely Have
• Preferably 10+ years experience designing, building and operating complex production software, with the technical breadth and judgement expected of a Staff Engineer.
• Strong practical experience with modern AI, ideally including AI-powered products, internal AI tooling or production LLM applications.
• Experience leading complex, high-impact technical initiatives across team or functional boundaries.
• Strong architecture and software engineering fundamentals across APIs, integrations, cloud infrastructure, security, scalability, observability and reliability.
• Strong product and commercial instincts — able to take an ambiguous problem through discovery, experimentation, user feedback and production delivery.
• Strong strategic judgement — connecting technical decisions to business outcomes and balancing short-term experimentation with sustainable long-term solutions.
• The ability to operate autonomously, influence without authority and drive critical work through to measurable outcomes.
• Excellent communication, listening and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong judgement around the evolving AI landscape, build vs buy, governance, security, quality and cost.
• A track record of raising the effectiveness of others through technical leadership, mentoring and knowledge sharing.
• You have a strong growth mindset, actively seeking and providing high-quality actionable feedback, and role model Phorest’s values as a culture ambassador.
• Most importantly, you’ll be deeply curious about AI, constantly exploring what’s becoming possible, and motivated by turning those possibilities into meaningful improvements in how an organisation operates.
• Nice to Have
• Experience building tools that help other teams use AI effectively, agentic systems, AI evaluation and orchestration, or establishing AI governance and managing AI tooling and model spend.

Benefits

• Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, 2 Wellness Days, an employee assistance program and a free online GP service.
• As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide competitive Compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection.
• We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets.
• We support the women who work in Phorest by offering 2 weeks leave for Fertility Treatment, Pregnancy Loss and Menopause.
• We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Benefits.

• We grow our own timber!

We provide a great learning environment and extensive development opportunities.

We run development programs and provide access to many online resources including Linked In learning.

• Moving house? Phorest employees get 3 moving days.

Phorest is an equal opportunity employer.

For this position, flexi-time and working from home is possible. We are also open to remote work.

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box.

So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch.

We’d love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.

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