Graduate Software Engineer (Cork, Ireland)

In a fast-paced global environment procurement can provide a real strategic challenge. At Keelvar we apply optimization and game theory to help enterprises source billions in spend. Keelvar was founded in Europe's largest AI research lab by a team of computer scientists. Powered by unique artificial intelligence, designed by our category experts, our mission is to help procurement teams globally to scale sourcing excellence. Keelvar is an award-winning, category leading, global sourcing optimization and autonomous sourcing vendor, optimising over $200bn+ in spend annually.

We have an opportunity for a Graduate Software Engineer to join our Product Engineering team. This role is based in Cork, Ireland (on-site/hybrid).

You will join a small, autonomous AI-native pod — a cross-functional team that uses AI tooling as part of how it designs, builds, and ships. From day one you will be working on real product alongside experienced engineers, not parked on side projects. You will report to one of our Engineering Managers, who will coach your growth, and you will have a senior engineer on your pod acting as a day-to-day mentor.

Your first months are about building context, shipping real work, and learning how production engineering happens in an AI-augmented team. A typical week might include:

• Pairing with a senior engineer on a feature you both own — picking up the pieces you can run with, and learning by watching how they shape the work.
• Shaping the product direction with the rest of the pod. Engineers here contribute to what we build and why, not just how — and as you build context on the customer problem, you will start offering your own ideas.
• Shipping smaller changes to production yourself. Change-to-prod is ~20 minutes through an automated CI/CD pipeline, so you will see your work in front of users quickly.
• Using AI coding agents (Claude Code, Copilot) as part of your daily workflow, but learning the discipline behind them. Our framing is AI-assisted: you own the output, no matter where it came from, and a big part of your growth is learning to review and direct these tools with a critical eye.
• Joining incident response, shadowing at first, then taking a more active role as you build context. You will see how the team investigates, communicates, and learns from things going wrong.
• Receiving thorough code reviews from peers who care about long-term maintainability as much as they care about shipping fast — and reviewing others' work too.

Foundations and curiosity. A degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline — or equivalent self-taught experience that shows you can build things end-to-end. We care more about how you think and how you learn than about what is on your transcript.

• Evidence you can ship something. A college or coursework project, internship, hackathon, open-source contribution, or personal project where you took an idea through to working software. We care about seeing something through to completion more than we care about its scale.
• Critical thinking with AI tools. Whether you have used Claude Code, Copilot, or similar tools heavily, dabbled with them, or are just curious, you can see why they need a sceptical user — and you do not accept first output uncritically. You will develop taste and judgement quickly here, because that matters more in an AI-augmented workflow, not less.
• Self-aware about what you do not yet know. You can say "I do not know, let me find out" without it being a big deal. You ask for help early rather than spinning on a problem for two days in silence.
• Comfortable communicating with your pod. Pods run on conversation — in chat, in planning docs, in standups, and face-to-face. You can articulate what you are working on, where you are stuck, and what you have tried.
• Interest in the full stack of the work. Pods own product slices end-to-end, so you will spend time in the frontend, in Python services, and pairing on agents. You do not need to be proficient in all of these on day one — but you do need to be open to working across them.

A note on what is not required: you do not need years of commercial experience, you do not need to have shipped production SaaS, and you do not need to already be fluent in our specific stack. We will teach you that. What we cannot teach is curiosity, judgement, and the willingness to keep learning.

Here at Keelvar, we are proud to offer flexible working and good benefits, including:

• Competitive salary at a growing organisation.
• Pension 7.5%
• Health Insurance
• 25 days PTO, increasing to 26 after 3 years, and increasing to 27 after 5 years. Plus a day off for your birthday.
• Flexible working hours with a positive approach to work - life balance.
• An inclusive, collaborative, innovative culture.
• Generous leave offerings including 2 CSR days.
• Modern toolkit and AI tooling provided so you can do your best work.

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 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.