Artificial Intelligence Engineer

SBS is seeking a skilled AI Engineer to join its Data & AI / Engineering organization in the UK or EU. This role will focus on designing, building, and deploying AI-driven solutions that enhance SBS products and client offerings. The ideal candidate will combine strong software engineering fundamentals with applied AI/ML expertise, enabling the development of scalable, production-grade AI systems in a regulated financial services environment.

Location: UK or EU

Hybrid/Remote: Remote (Occasional travel required)

Responsibilities:

• AI Solution Development: Design, build, and deploy AI/ML models and intelligent applications across SBS platforms. Develop solutions leveraging Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Generative AI (GenAI / LLMs). Translate business requirements into technical AI solutions that deliver measurable impact.
• Model Deployment & MLOps: Implement and manage end-to-end ML pipelines, from data ingestion to model deployment and monitoring. Collaborate with DevOps and engineering teams to ensure scalable, reliable production deployment. Maintain and optimize model performance, accuracy, and efficiency over time.
• Product Integration: Integrate AI capabilities into core banking, payments, and digital platforms. Work closely with Product Managers, Architects, and Developers to embed AI into customer-facing solutions. Support API development and microservices architecture for AI-driven features.
• Data Engineering Collaboration: Partner with data engineers to ensure data quality, availability, and pipeline integrity. Work with structured and unstructured datasets across large-scale, distributed systems.
• Innovation & Continuous Improvement: Stay current with advancements in AI, GenAI, and emerging technologies. Contribute to experimentation, prototyping, and innovation initiatives. Identify opportunities to improve automation, efficiency, and decision-making through AI.

Qualifications:

• Software Architecture & Design: Strong grasp of clean/hexagonal architecture, dependency injection, SOLID principles, and protocol-based interfaces. Can design well-structured Python services with clear separation of concerns, testable components, and maintainable codebases. Experience designing and maintaining RESTful API contracts. Understands OpenAPI specifications, versioning strategies, schema evolution, and backward compatibility. Distributed systems thinking — understands event-driven patterns, asynchronous communication, eventual consistency, and the trade-offs of different integration approaches. Can reason about how components interact across service boundaries. Can design domain models, define data flows between system components, and make pragmatic schema design decisions.
• AI & LLM Application Skills: Hands-on experience building production applications powered by LLMs. Must go beyond API calls — RAG pipelines, chain-of-thought reasoning, structured output parsing, multi-step workflows. This is a sovereign AI system. The candidate must design against standardized API interfaces (OpenAI-compatible, LiteLLM, or equivalent abstraction layers). Demonstrated experience designing multi-step AI systems where the model makes decisions about what to do next. Can demonstrate iterative prompt development for complex tasks.
• Python Engineering: Strong async Python with FastAPI or equivalent framework. Comfortable with Pydantic for data validation, SQLAlchemy for data access, and structured logging (structlog). Writes clean, testable, well-documented code with proper type hints. Safeguards for hallucinated tools, loops, partial completion, and unsafe actions.
• Engineering Qualities: The candidate joins a substantial existing codebase and architecture. They must be comfortable reading, understanding, and extending code they did not write. Thinks about error handling, retry logic, graceful degradation, observability, and security as first-class concerns. Can explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders. Can write clear design documents.

Company Overview: At SBS, we’re more than just a technology company; we’re a global fintech partner helping banks and financial institutions transform, innovate, and grow. Our solutions power everything from digital banking and lending to payments and core banking systems. As part of 74Software, we’re backed by a group of leading software companies delivering mission-critical solutions worldwide. Our focus is on delivering long-term value, leveraging cutting-edge technology, and fostering strong client partnerships. Join us and be part of a collaborative, forward-thinking team shaping the future of finance.

Why SBS? At SBS, we’re committed to supporting our employees in every aspect of their lives, from health and wellbeing to financial security and lifestyle perks. We offer benefits that help you thrive at work and beyond, including health coverage, retirement plans, paid time off, flexible work options, career development, competitive pay, and global culture perks.

Equal Opportunity Employer: We are committed to providing equal opportunities and ensuring a fair and inclusive recruitment process. We do not discriminate on the basis of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or any other protected characteristic.