Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike - with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’.
The word ‘Pleo’ actually means ‘more than you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.
Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together.
This is an exciting opportunity to help shape how Pleo builds AI-powered product features, working alongside software engineers, data engineers and data scientists to take ideas from prototype to production. Pleo has over 40,000 customers and a decade of unique spend data — an incredible foundation to build on. Your mission will be to harness this data to create real product value.
This is not a solo end-to-end role. You'll work as part of a small, complementary data team — pairing with a Staff Data Platform Engineer and a Staff Data Scientist — each bringing distinct skills while you bring applied AI engineering and data context. Together, the team covers the full chain from data to shipped product.
While part of the Data team and reporting directly into our Director of Data Product, you'll work embedded in product squads across the business. Your core focus is on building and shipping AI-powered features — with a strong collaborative element across Product Engineering, GenAI Core, and Data Platform teams.
As a Staff Applied AI Engineer you will:
Work alongside product engineers and data specialists to build and ship AI-powered products including spend intelligence, automated actions, agentic workflows, and more.
Work directly with Product, Design, Engineering, and business stakeholders to advise and prioritise on what's actually worth building. You aren't just implementing specs, you're discovering and defining the product.
Own the evaluation, monitoring, and operationalisation of AI features — setting up evals, tracking drift and performance, and managing prompt changes safely in production. You will help establish how Pleo does this at scale and own the development in production.
Partner with our GenAI Core platform team to define and prioritise what tooling is being built for the whole company, and subsequently act as a champion for the use and adoption of our tooling.
You will thrive in this role if you have:
Proven experience shipping GenAI features at scale in a customer-facing product. You've moved past prototype phases and ideally have experience shipping multi-step, tool-using agents in a user-facing product.
The ability to translate complex business challenges and product visions into scalable AI solutions. In other words, you can autonomously scope, design and build.
Experience setting up evals, monitoring, and production observability for LLM-based systems.
Solid experience with the modern AI stack including Vector DBs, orchestration frameworks and LLM APIs.
Experience building APIs, services and data retrieval pipelines (RAG, vector search...) to feed data into LLMs.
Deep proficiency with Python for both data and software engineering, SQL and BigQuery or similar major cloud providers.
To share extra context, our current tech stack includes GCP, BigQuery, Airflow, Python, SQL on the Data side and AWS, Kotlin, Javascript, Typescript on the Product side while our infrastructure is containerised with Kubernetes. Experience across those technologies or languages would be considered a bonus.
This role is a good fit for you if:
You are a software engineer with product instincts. You build with the user in mind. You understand that a model is only as good as the problem it solves.
You have moved pas prototyping and have a deep understanding of the realities of LLMOps, data retrieval, prompt and context engineering, as well as model evaluation in production.
You don't just call APIs, you understand the data feeding the AI system and can reason about data quality, architecture, and retrieval without needing a dedicated data engineer beside you at all times.
This role is not a good fit for you if:
You want to focus on research and algorithm development. We need someone who cares about shipping solutions to production right now, turning AI concepts into functional features that solve real financial problems today.
You need a perfectly groomed backlog, structured tooling and pre-defined specs. We expect our Staff Engineers to be able to navigate ambiguity, to autonomously scope solutions and build any new tooling that might be required.
You can't explain complex AI trade-offs to a CEO or a designer without losing them in the weeds. You work well with stakeholders who are very technically or commercially focused.
In your first 6 months at Pleo, you’ll:
Familiarise yourself with our codebase, tooling and roadmap.
Partner with our Principal Engineer to define and own our approach to AI feature development.
Contribute to shaping the roadmap for tooling and features developed by our GenAI Core team.
Collaborate with Product and Data teams to ship a first feature to production
We’re committed to helping you develop your career, whether that means taking on bigger projects, stepping into leadership, or acquiring new skills!
Please note: We can hire on a remote, hybrid or in-person set-up in any of the locations listed on the advert but you will need to be physically based in the country of your choice with a valid right to work.
We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.
Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office
Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis
We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays
For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options
We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far
Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work
We want to ensure you are set-up for success and understand what will be expected of you. If your application is successful, our interview process is as follows:
Intro call: A 30-minute chat with our Talent Partner to discuss the role and your background.
Hiring Manager interview: A 60-minute conversation to deep dive into your knowledge and experience.
System design interview: A 75-minute practical session with our engineers focusing on scop
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