About the job

• Cpl Recruitment is partnering with a global organisation investing heavily in its AI capability. We are looking for a Lead Engineer to help shape and deliver the engineering foundations behind scalable, real-world AI products.
• This is a senior, hands-on player-coach role for someone who can set technical direction while still getting close to architecture, code and delivery. You will work with engineering, product and business leaders to move AI and machine learning solutions beyond experimentation and into secure, reliable production environments.

• What you’ll doSet the technical vision and architecture for AI-powered products, platforms and shared engineering capabilities.
• Lead the design and delivery of scalable cloud-native services, APIs and distributed systems.
• Drive the production deployment of machine learning and generative AI solutions, ensuring they are robust, observable, secure and commercially valuable.
• Guide the use of LLMs, AI agents, RAG, vector databases and workflow orchestration where they solve meaningful product challenges.
• Remain hands-on across architecture, engineering standards, complex technical decisions and software delivery.
• Act as a player-coach, mentoring senior engineers, raising technical standards and supporting teams through difficult delivery challenges.
• Build reusable tooling, platform services and developer capabilities that make AI product development faster and more consistent.
• Establish best practice across CI/CD, testing, security, observability, reliability and AI governance.
• Partner with product and business stakeholders to turn complex requirements into practical, scalable technology solutions.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and make pragmatic decisions on where they can create real value.

• What you’ll bring8+ years’ commercial software engineering experience, including experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Lead Architect or equivalent senior technical leadership role.
• Strong track record designing and delivering large-scale, cloud-native systems in production.
• Proven experience bringing machine learning, generative AI or AI-enabled products from concept through to live production use.
• Strong hands-on backend engineering and software architecture experience; Python is strongly preferred.
• Experience with Google Cloud, AWS or Azure, ideally with exposure to modern AI and data services.
• Deep understanding of production AI engineering, including LLMs, RAG, agents, vector databases, evaluation, monitoring and lifecycle management.
• Experience building reusable platforms or shared engineering services rather than solely standalone proofs of concept.
• A player-coach mindset: credible technical leadership combined with the willingness to stay hands-on and support delivery directly.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to influence senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Must have Irish or EU citizenship, and already based within a commutable distance of Dublin.

• Nice to haveExperience with Vertex AI, Gemini APIs or comparable AI platforms.
• MLOps, AI governance, model monitoring or production ML lifecycle experience.
• Background in media, digital content, entertainment or high-scale consumer technology.
• Experience developing internal developer platforms, engineering tooling or AI infrastructure.