Staff Engineer (GenAI Core)
Messy spend management is tricky business. And tedious processes are a lose-lose situation for all involved, not just finance. At Pleo, we're changing that. We build spend solutions that make managing money seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike—with a vision to help all businesses ‘go beyond’.
The word ‘Pleo’ actually means ‘more than you’d expect’, and living by that mantra has been the secret to our success over the last 10 years.
Now, we’re at a pivotal moment in our journey; every move we make has a direct impact on our 40,000+ customers, our business, and our collective success. We need people who take pride in uncovering customer needs, who turn complex problems into simple solutions, challenge the way things are done (respectfully), and always aim high. With great ambitions driving us forward, we can’t say we’ve got this whole thing figured out. And frankly, that’s half the fun! What we can say is that we’re a driven, progressive, and, importantly, a kind bunch of 850+ people from over 100 nationalities, all committed to delivering the future of business spending, together.
At Pleo, we're on a mission to make spend management surprisingly effective and empowering.
We're hiring a Staff Engineer to join the GenAI Core team. You will help set technical direction for Pleo's AI platform, the shared infrastructure that enables product teams across the company to build AI-powered features reliably and at scale.
What GenAI Core does
GenAI Core owns and operates Pleo's AI platform infrastructure. We are the team that makes it possible for every other product team at Pleo to build AI-powered features, reliably, observably, and without reinventing the wheel.
That means:
- LLM routing and access: a centralised LLM proxy layer (LiteLLM) that routes requests to different model providers (Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini), with budget enforcement and rate limiting
- Observability and evaluation: integrations and tooling (BrainTrust) to monitor, log, and evaluate LLM calls in production, supporting both automated evaluation and human review
- Platform standards and guidance: we define how AI is done at Pleo, providing patterns, contracts, and shared components that product teams build on
- Internal consulting: as product teams across Pleo adopt AI capabilities, GenAI Core will increasingly act as a technical partner, helping teams design and implement AI features correctly on top of the platform
This is software engineering work. While the domain revolves around AI infrastructure, you will spend most of your time building reliable, scalable backend systems.
What you’ll be doing
In this role, you will be a force multiplier for platform quality and technical direction.
- Drive the design, delivery, and evolution of the GenAI Core platform, the shared AI infrastructure used by all product teams at Pleo
- Own and evolve service architecture, APIs, and integration contracts, with a high bar for reliability and observability
- Set technical direction for key parts of the platform, including LLM routing, budget enforcement, observability pipelines, and evaluation infrastructure
- Lead cross-team technical initiatives and act as a trusted technical partner when product teams need to build AI-powered features on top of the platform
- Raise the engineering bar through strong practices: code reviews, incident follow-ups, safe change management, and resilient system design
- Proactively identify and address technical debt, and guide the team through architectural decisions and migrations
- Support other engineers through pairing, reviews, and technical guidance
- Contribute hands-on in code. You should expect to be coding a meaningful part of the time.
You’ll bring solid experience with
- Designing and maintaining backend systems with strong requirements for reliability and observability
- Building and operating a shared platform or infrastructure components used by multiple teams
- Distributed systems fundamentals, including async workflows, idempotency, consistency, and designing for failure
- API design, clear service boundaries, and integrating with external systems in a maintainable way
- Observability and owning systems in production, including monitoring, alerting, incident response, and post-mortems
- Strong testing practices and a high quality mindset
- Clear communication and pragmatic decision-making across teams and stakeholders
Nice to have
- Hands-on experience working with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, or similar) in a production system
- Familiarity with LLM evaluation patterns such as LLM-as-judge, vector similarity, and sampling strategies
- Experience building or operating proxy or routing layers for AI workloads
Your colleagues would say you
- Lead by example and raise the bar with pragmatism and care
- Communicate clearly, listen well, and bring people along in decisions
- Enjoy breaking down complex problems, gathering input, and driving to a solution
- Coach and mentor others and create space for people to grow
- Prefer progress over perfection, while still caring deeply about quality
Show me the benefits!
- Your own Pleo card (no more out-of-pocket spending!)
- Lunch is on us for your work days - enjoy catered meals or receive a lunch allowance based on your local office 🍜
- Comprehensive private healthcare - depending on your location, coverage options include Vitality, Alan or Médis
- We offer 25 days of holiday + your public holidays
- For our Team, we offer both hybrid and fully remote working options
- Option to purchase 5 additional days of holiday through a salary sacrifice
- We use MyndUp to give our employees access to free mental health and well-being support with great success so far ❤️🩹
- Paid parental leave - we want to make sure that we're supportive of families and help you feel that you don't have to compromise your family due to work 👶
About your application
- Please submit your application in English; it’s our company language so you’ll be speaking lots of it if you join 💕
- We treat all candidates equally: If you are interested please apply through our application system - any correspondence should come from there! Our lovely support team isn't able to pass on any calls/ emails our way - and this makes sure that the candidate experience is smooth and fair to everyone 😊
- We can only achieve our goals if our team reflects the diversity of the world around us - and that starts with you, hitting apply, even if you are worried you might not tick all the boxes. We embrace and encourage people from all backgrounds to apply - regardless of race/ethnicity, colour, religion, nationality, gender, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, neurodiversity, socio-economic status, culture or beliefs.
- When you submit an application we process your personal data as a data processor. Find out more about how your data is used in the FAQs section at the bottom of our jobs page.
Got any questions?
Read our FAQApply for this role
We’re looking for new friends, gifted minds, team players, restless talents and passionate problem solvers.
Some more roles for you...
And it doesn’t stop there. Why not have a browse at our other open roles in this department?
How Pleo hires
1
The first call(s)
Let’s get to know each other. We want to find out more about you, your motivations, and give you more information about the role.
2
The challenge
The task is deliberately open-ended and based on something you'll actually work on. There are no right or wrong answers here.
3
The team interview
Expect to share a (virtual) meeting room with two to three people you'll work with regularly if you get the job.
4
The final interview
A call with someone in leadership who’ll walk you through the big picture and chat about how your role will figure into that.
FAQ
This is a big decision for both of us. If you join us, we’ll spend a lot of time together working on some pretty cool things. That's why we've designed a hiring process that allows everyone to make the right choice. Read more about how we hire here.