AI Engineer (Cork, Ireland)

Permanent employee, Full-time · Ireland

Role

Keelvar has an exciting opportunity to join our Engineering & Product team as an AI Engineer. This role is based in Cork, Ireland.

You will be part of a growing team focused on embedding advanced AI capabilities across Keelvar’s sourcing products. Working closely with engineers, data scientists and product managers, you’ll design, build and deploy intelligent systems that improve how our users interact with and benefit from Keelvar’s technology.

Responsibilities

Design, prototype, and productionise AI systems including LLM-based agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and AI-driven workflows.
Integrate and orchestrate LLMs (e.g. OpenAI, Anthropic, or custom fine-tuned models) using frameworks such as LangGraph, PydanticAI and Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Build AI evaluation and feedback loops to ensure high-quality, reliable model behaviour in production.
Collaborate with software engineers and product managers to integrate AI features into user-facing products with strong monitoring, resilience, and measurable user value.
Experiment, measure, and iterate from prompt design and model selection to API optimization, latency, and cost trade-offs.
Contribute to AI platform infrastructure: data pipelines, embedding, vector stores, model deployment and observability.
Stay current with AI research and apply emerging techniques that improve reasoning, grounding, and reliability in multi-agent systems.
Take a hands-on approach to shipping high-quality code incrementally, we value learning through iteration over aiming for perfection upfront.
Participate in code reviews and architecture discussions to ensure technical excellence and knowledge sharing.
Work closely with the Product team to shape features that are valuable, feasible, and grounded in users needs.
Assist and mentor junior team members.

Your profile

Strong experience (5+ years) in Python and backend systems, ideally within a SaaS or data-rich product environment.
Deep understanding of LLM-based systems, including prompt engineering, retrieval augmentation, evaluation and model integration.
Hands-on experience with AI orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, PydanticAI or similar).
Familiarity with ML pipeline tooling and deployment an advantage (e.g., vector databases, embeddings, Docker, AWS ECS, Pulumi etc.)
Strong software engineering practices like version control, CI/CD, observability, and testing of AI-enabled systems.
Awareness of LLMOps best practices, from managing API costs to monitoring model drift and user satisfaction.
A product mindset: balancing experimentation with delivering business value to users.
Curiosity and initiative you’re motivated by discovery, iteration and seeing ideas reach production.
Collaborative spirit and excellent communication, your comfortable working across disciplines (Engineering, Product, Design, and Data Science).
You thrive in an environment of mutual respect, openness and collaboration. You enjoy getting things done at a quick pace.

Why us?

Here at Keelvar, we are proud to be a remote-first organisation and we offer some great perks.

Competitive salary with a Series B backed, fast growing organisation
25 days holidays increasing to 26 after 3 years and increasing again to 27 after 5 years. Plus your birthday off on us
Flexible working hours with a positive approach to work - life balance
An inclusive, collaborative, innovative culture
Generous leave offerings including Wellbeing days
Technology that enables you to perform to your best

If you really like the sound of the role but don't match every listed criteria exactly, we still want to hear from you. You could be the exact fit for this or any of our other roles.

We are also a diverse group and we intend to continue to attract and retain diverse talent in our organisation. We're committed to an inclusive and diverse Keelvar. We do not discriminate based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race.

Position ID

1081285

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About us

This is an exciting opportunity to join a cutting edge company, disrupting its industry. Currently optimising over $100bn+ in procurement spend for the world's largest companies, Keelvar is more than just a software company. Keelvar is an evolution of how companies work.

Our technology is unparalleled in its space. We are on a fast-paced journey to herald a new era of SaaS 3.0. Using AI, Machine Learning, and Game Theory to build intelligent systems that optimize and automate the procurement sourcing process, we save our customers millions of dollars every year, and help their suppliers find the best customers for them. Many of the world’s top blue chip companies use Keelvar to aid negotiations; they set high standards that we relish achieving because it helps us be the best at what we do.

We believe we can change the world and have fun doing it. We are a hard-working team who love what we do. We believe that a culture of curiosity, experimentation, and risk-taking is the key to finding breakthrough approaches - and we don’t settle for conventional approaches.

We strive for excellence, challenging ourselves and each other, with independent thinking, a lot of focus, and plenty of collaboration. In our eyes, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the reward. We’re not content with just equipping users with good tools; we want to help our customers achieve success and excellence, and sometimes this requires lateral or unconventional thinking. We want you to share your knowledge readily and learn every day. We like to ask questions, and answer questions when we can. We invite you to a workplace that is inclusive and celebrates diversity. We support everyone in being themselves, feeling empowered and inspired to make a difference.

If you are passionate about how technology is changing the world of work and want to work with a great team, this is the role for you.

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We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Thank you for your interest in Keelvar. Please fill out the following short form. If you have difficulties, please send an email to careers@keelvar.com.