Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
Moody's is seeking a highly experienced Staff Software Engineer specializing in AI to design, develop, and lead the delivery of scalable AI platforms and intelligent applications. You will act as a hands-on technical leader, contributing high-quality production code while guiding the technical direction of AI-powered products and services. This role involves building backend services, APIs, data and inference pipelines, and platform capabilities that 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. Key responsibilities include making critical technical decisions, establishing engineering best practices, championing machine learning operations, and mentoring engineers. You will collaborate closely with product managers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and business stakeholders to translate strategic priorities into robust technical solutions. The role offers the opportunity to evaluate emerging AI technologies through prototypes and production-readiness assessments and to contribute to reusable frameworks and developer tooling that accelerate AI development across teams. Join the Digital Content and Innovation team to work on cutting-edge AI challenges, contribute directly to production code and architecture, and be part of a culture that values curiosity, innovation, knowledge sharing, and continuous growth.

Experience
- 8+ years in software engineering with deep hands-on experience 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
- Deep expertise 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 (AWS, GCP, Azure) and container orchestration technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, or Elastic Container Service
- Strong experience designing and implementing APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, vector databases, observability, and automated deployment pipelines
- Demonstrated leadership in influencing technical direction, mentoring engineers, and hands-on problem solving
- Deep expertise in AI with a track record of implementing advanced AI solutions to drive strategic transformation and operational efficiency
- Experience managing AI-related risks, ensuring ethical governance, and fostering responsible AI adoption

About you
You are a hands-on technical leader passionate about AI innovation and engineering excellence. You thrive in collaborative environments, enjoy mentoring and coaching engineers, and are committed to responsible AI practices. You are adept at translating complex AI concepts into practical, scalable solutions and have a strong sense of ownership and accountability for code quality and system performance.

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