Applied AI Engineer

Company Description

At IFS, we're building the next generation of AI-native enterprise software, transforming how some of the world's largest organisations manage assets, operations and critical services.

This is an opportunity to work at the forefront of modern AI engineering, building intelligent products that combine Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic AI and cloud-native technologies to solve complex, real-world business challenges at enterprise scale.

We're looking for engineers who are passionate about building production AI systems and excited by the opportunity to shape the future of enterprise software.

Please note that this role requires demonstrable, hands-on experience designing, building and shipping production AI applications.

Candidates whose AI experience is limited to using tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor or GitHub Copilot to assist software development, without demonstrable experience building AI-powered products or systems, will not meet the requirements for this role.

IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. We deliver award-winning enterprise software solutions through the use of embedded digital innovation and a single cloud-based platform to help businesses be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™.

At IFS, we're flexible, we're innovative, and we're focused not only on how we can engage with our customers, but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society's greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.

We celebrate diversity and accept that there are so many different perspectives in this world. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.

By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.

We're looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs.

If you want to change the status quo, we'll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.

Job Description

About the AI Software Factory

The AI Software Factory is a new software-engineering function inside R&D. We build the systems that let AI agents do real engineering work on IFS software: design, implementation, testing, review.

We are after an order-of-magnitude improvement in delivery speed. That is a hypothesis we intend to prove or disprove in production, not a slogan. Faster only counts if the software still works, stays secure, and can be supported afterwards.

Our output is software. Orchestration, evaluation, codebase analysis, verification, and the interfaces that connect all of that to the way engineers actually work. Product teams are our users and our pilot partners. The team is new, so the first pilots and much of the technical architecture are still open questions. You would be joining to turn the proposition into something that runs, rather than to inherit a finished system.

One of our core deliverables is a reusable framework for parallel software engineering at IFS. It has to define how a feature gets broken into work several agents can do at once, how dependencies and shared state limit that, what context, tools and guardrails each agent receives, where an engineer reviews or decides, and how separately produced changes come back together as one releasable result. It must cover the full lifecycle: plan, design, build, test, review, document, operate. Parallel code generation on its own is not the goal.

Why this role?

Pointing one agent at one ticket is increasingly common. Building a repeatable framework where many agents plan, build, test and review parts of one outcome at the same time and still produce coherent software is not, and you would be helping define how it works.

You get a meaningful slice of that capability. Clear responsibility for working components and the evidence behind one pilot, with senior architecture support behind you, instead of a queue of disconnected tickets. What you build is production engineering infrastructure: evaluation, regression and codebase-analysis systems used to decide whether an agentic workflow is safe enough to expand. Those results inform whether a pilot proceeds, where human controls stay necessary, and which practices get adopted more widely across IFS.

Our interview process uses realistic work samples from the Factory's problem space, such as agent-generated changes and evaluation evidence, so both sides can look at actual work instead of talking around it.

The problem this role exists to solve

An agent opens a pull request and CI goes green. That proves less than it looks. The agent may have written the tests itself, missed an indirect dependency, or made a change that works alone and collides with what another agent is doing three files away.

So verification splits in two:

Is this agent's output correct? Eval suites that mean something, deterministic checks, human validation where judgement cannot be avoided, and regression tests that keep known failures fixed when a model or prompt changes.

Do many agents' outputs compose? A codebase is a graph of dependencies. Running agents at the same time means understanding blast radius, spotting overlapping work, and verifying the merged result rather than approving a collection of individually green pull requests.

You help build that framework and prove it on real pilots. Principles become working software: work decomposition and dependency models, agent orchestration and isolation, coordination and reintegration, and the checks that show the composed result holds. You own substantial components and the evidence they produce, with architecture direction from a senior engineer. You contribute to the Factory-wide architecture without being expected to define it alone.

What you'll do

You help define and implement the framework for parallel software engineering across planning, design, build, test, review, documentation and operation. For each phase that means making it explicit what agents execute, what engineers review, and what stays human-owned.

Much of the work is mechanism. Turning a feature or engineering objective into a dependency-aware work graph: which tasks can run concurrently, which have to be sequenced, what context each agent needs, and where results have to synchronise. Then the controls that make running them at once safe, which means isolation of concurrent changes, dependency and blast-radius analysis, detection of overlapping work, failure and retry handling, and verification that a batch holds together as a whole.

You build and maintain an eval suite for a real agentic engineering workflow, covering planning, implementation, testing and review. You wire a pilot codebase and its CI pipeline into the Factory's verification harness: ground truth, smoke tests, full-suite execution, reporting someone can actually read. Every agent failure you observe becomes a durable regression test, so it stays fixed across model, prompt and tooling changes.

Some of it is judgement rather than code. Reviewing held-out agent outputs through a structured human-validation process, then working out when automated judging agrees with independent human reviewers closely enough to be worth trusting. Investigating runs that failed or came out strange, and making a defensible call: what failed, why it matters, which check backs the conclusion.

You also work with pilot teams on real delivery. Set the delegate/review/own boundary, watch where parallel work succeeds or falls apart, and turn what you learn into reusable capability instead of one-off pilot fixes.

Your centre of gravity is building and proving the parallel software-engineering framework through one pilot. The reusable capability is the product. The pilot is where its assumptions meet a real codebase, a real delivery workflow and a real engineering team.

In your first six months: take one pilot workflow from an engineering objective through dependency-aware decomposition, parallel agent execution, human review, reintegration and end-to-end evaluation against its real codebase and CI. Deliver reusable framework components, a documented set of known failure modes, and evidence showing where parallelism is safe, where work has to sequence, and why.

Qualifications

What you'll bring

You enjoy building with AI and want to help define a new way of producing software rather than bolt an agent onto the existing one. You see work that can be decomposed, dependencies that constrain it, and the failure paths that show up when several streams run at once. You want real ownership, and you also value architecture guidance and rigorous review. Most importantly, when someone asks “Can these run in parallel?” and “How do you know the result composes?”, your instinct is to show the model and the check.

We are not screening for one programming language or framework. The Factory works across different IFS product codebases, so adaptability and engineering fundamentals matter more than stack matching.

A track record of shipping and maintaining production-quality software, with the judgement to own a well-scoped system from proposed approach through implementation, review and operation. This is not an entry-level role, though we care about demonstrated judgement more than a particular number of years.

Practical experience building with AI agents or tool-using LLM systems, beyond a single chat-completion call. Professional work, open source, research, formal study or substantial independent projects all count.

You can enter an unfamiliar codebase, learn its stack, and reason about work as a dependency graph: what proceeds independently, what shares state, what has to sequence, and what a change can reach.

Strong testing instincts, and the writing to go with them. You ask what evidence separates “this appears to work” from “we have checked the behaviour that matters”, and you can explain what was checked, what failed, and how confident anyone should be in the result.

Nice to have

None of this is required. All of it would help.

Evaluation or testing methods beyond conventional unit tests: experimental design, inter-rater agreement, A/B testing, statistical analysis.

Graph-shaped systems and concurrent work: static analysis, call graphs, monorepo build systems, DAGs, queues, fan-out/fan-in, isolation, partial failure, multiple workers modifying shared state. Agent systems, build systems, CI and data pipelines all pose the same underlying problems.

Familiarity with MCP or another tool-calling or agent-orchestration framework.

Work in regulated, security-sensitive or high-consequence engineering environments, where a working result also has to be demonstrably controlled.

These are genuinely optional. If you have built practical agentic systems, care about proving their behaviour and can grow into the less familiar parts, we would like to hear from you.

Additional Information

We embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. Our commitment ensures you can work in a way that suits you best, while also engaging with colleagues to share ideas and build meaningful relationships.