Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Negotiable

About the Role
As a Staff Software Engineer specializing in 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, dedicating significant time to designing, coding, reviewing, debugging, and improving production systems supporting 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 optimization, agentic workflows, and tool integration. You will make key technical decisions while ensuring code maintainability, system performance, reliability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency. Establishing engineering best practices through hands-on contribution, code reviews, design reviews, automated testing, observability, monitoring, and operational excellence will be central to your role. You will champion machine learning operations practices including model lifecycle management, prompt versioning, automated evaluation, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and continuous improvement. Partnering with product managers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, engineering leaders, and business stakeholders, you will 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. You will join the Digital Content and Innovation (DC&I) team, which 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 collaborates closely across the full AI lifecycle, from experimentation and prototyping to large-scale production deployment, shaping reusable platforms, frameworks, and responsible AI practices. This role offers the opportunity to work on some of the most exciting challenges in applied AI, 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 of experience in software engineering 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 while guiding technical direction. Proven experience building enterprise AI applications using large language models, AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering, orchestration frameworks, evaluation methods, and model optimization techniques. Demonstrated 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 background designing and implementing APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, vector databases, observability, and automated deployment pipelines. Proven leadership in influencing 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. 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 and software engineering. You thrive in collaborative environments and enjoy mentoring and guiding engineers. You are committed to engineering excellence, operational best practices, and responsible AI. You have strong communication skills and the ability to translate complex technical concepts into practical solutions. You embrace continuous learning and innovation, and you are motivated by solving challenging problems that have real business impact.

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