Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Pliant is a European fintech specializing in B2B payment solutions through an API-first platform for business spending and embedded finance. The Applied AI Engineer will design and ship reliable AI-powered finance experiences, including copilots, chat systems, autonomous workflows, retrieval systems, and internal tools. The role combines software engineering, product thinking, experimentation, evaluation, observability, and production deployment of AI systems.
Responsibilities
- Design and build AI-powered product experiences for finance and spend management
- Build chat experiences, copilots, autonomous workflows, and internal AI tools that solve real customer and operational problems
- Work with LLMs, structured financial data, APIs, and business logic to build production-grade AI systems. This includes retrieval systems such as vector search, hybrid retrieval, and text-to-SQL, plus OCR and document understanding
- Design AI solutions using the right approach for the problem; whether that’s tool calling, retrieval, agentic workflows, deterministic logic, or a combination of them
- Build systems that are observable and explainable, not black boxes. Put guardrails and quality monitoring in place so we can trust them in production
- Create evaluation approaches that help us measure whether our AI systems are actually improving
- Experiment with new models and techniques, then turn the useful ones into production features
- Think carefully about accuracy, latency, cost, reliability, and user trust
- Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to shape what we build
- Help raise the AI engineering bar across Pliant
Skills
- Experience shipping AI-powered products or features into production
- Strong software engineering skills in Java (Spring Boot) and/or Python ecosystem
- Knowledge of distributed architecture patterns and anti-patterns
- A good understanding of how modern LLM-based applications are built beyond simple prompting
- Hands-on experience with common LLM interaction patterns such as tool calling, memory, structured outputs, RAG, embeddings, agentic loops, and evaluation
- The ability to design systems where AI is part of a larger architecture, not the whole architecture
- A product mindset: you care about whether the thing you build is useful, not just whether it is technically interesting
- The ability to move between experimentation and production-quality engineering
- Strong communication skills and comfort working in a cross-functional team
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, Terraform, and scalable backend systems is a plus
- It is a plus if you have worked in fintech, accounting, spend management, payments, or banking
Benefits
- The opportunity to work in a growing team with big responsibilities that thrives on a strong exchange of knowledge and excellence
- Your choice of preferred OS, Windows or Mac
- Flat hierarchy and transparent communication in a relaxed, professional atmosphere
- Opportunity to develop your talent in a dynamic team with ambitious goals
- Flexibility and possibility to work remotely
- Pliant Card with monthly credit to explore the product and enjoy food with colleagues
Company Overview