Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
As a Staff Software Engineer - AI at Moody's, you will design, code, and lead the delivery of scalable AI platforms and intelligent applications that bring emerging AI capabilities into production. You will act as a hands-on technical leader, spending significant time designing, coding, reviewing, debugging, and improving production systems that support AI-powered products and services. Your responsibilities include building scalable backend services, APIs, data and inference pipelines, and platform capabilities to support real-time and batch AI workloads at enterprise scale. You will implement advanced large language model applications using retrieval-augmented generation, prompt orchestration, evaluation frameworks, model optimisation, agentic workflows, and tool integration. You will make key technical decisions while ensuring code maintainability, system performance, reliability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency. You will establish engineering best practices through hands-on contribution, code reviews, design reviews, automated testing, observability, monitoring, and operational excellence. Championing machine learning operations practices such as model lifecycle management, prompt versioning, automated evaluation, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and continuous improvement will be a core part of your role. You will collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, engineering leaders, and business stakeholders to translate strategic priorities into robust, buildable technical solutions. Additionally, you will build reusable frameworks, libraries, developer tooling, and platform components that accelerate AI development across multiple teams without creating unnecessary abstraction or complexity. Evaluating emerging AI technologies through prototypes, proof-of-concept builds, and production-readiness assessments, you will guide teams on implementation patterns and trade-offs. As a senior individual contributor, you will mentor engineers through technical coaching, pairing, code reviews, design feedback, documentation, and example-setting.

About the Team
Our Digital Content and Innovation (DC&I) team builds next-generation internal and external products powered by cutting-edge AI technologies, including large language models, AI agents, machine learning, and natural language processing. The team combines engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists to solve complex challenges and turn breakthrough ideas into practical products that enhance productivity, unlock insights, and create measurable business impact. Collaboration is central to the team’s approach, with engineers contributing across the full AI lifecycle from experimentation and prototyping to large-scale production deployment, while shaping reusable platforms, frameworks, and responsible AI practices. Joining this team means working on some of the most exciting challenges in applied AI, contributing directly to production code and architecture, and being part of a culture that values curiosity, innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous growth.

Experience
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with deep hands-on expertise designing, coding, testing, and operating scalable, resilient, production-grade backend systems and cloud-native services
- Expert-level coding skills in modern programming languages such as Python, TypeScript, Go, or similar, with the ability to contribute high-quality production code and guide technical direction
- Deep hands-on experience building enterprise AI applications using large language models, AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering, orchestration frameworks, evaluation methods, and model optimisation techniques
- Proven ability to take complex AI solutions from prototype to production, balancing performance, scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and cost
- Expert knowledge of cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure, with strong experience using Docker, Kubernetes, Elastic Container Service, or equivalent technologies in production
- Strong experience designing and implementing APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, vector databases, observability, and automated deployment pipelines
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction while remaining close to the codebase, mentoring engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, debugging, and hands-on problem solving
- Deep expertise in artificial intelligence with a track record of implementing advanced AI solutions to drive strategic transformation and operational efficiency
- Strong experience using AI tools to lead innovation initiatives and demonstrated leadership in managing AI-related risks, ensuring ethical governance, and fostering responsible AI adoption

About you
You are a highly skilled and motivated engineer passionate about AI and software engineering excellence. You thrive in a collaborative environment and enjoy mentoring others while remaining hands-on with code. You are committed to responsible AI practices and eager to drive innovation through practical, scalable solutions. You have strong communication skills and can translate complex technical concepts to diverse stakeholders.

Qualifications
Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.