AI Engineer

AI ENGINEER At Gradient Labs https://gradient-labs.ai/, we’re on a mission to make exceptional customer service the norm. Founded in 2023, we’ve quickly gone from an idea to a growing team with customers you know (and probably love). Our AI agent helps businesses handle even the trickiest, high-stakes customer support queries safely and effectively, all while giving them the visibility and control they need to trust the outcomes. We’re a small but mighty team of builders from leading companies like Monzo, Pleo, and Google. We work in a hybrid model from our London office, a short walk from Liverpool Street Station, where we collaborate and connect 2-3 days a week. If you’re excited to tackle some of the hardest problems in AI and help shape the future of customer operations, we’d love to hear from you. 🎯 HOW YOU’LL MAKE AN IMPACT This is a build-and-ship role. You'll turn ambiguous customer support problems into reliable, observable AI agents that handle live conversations for real users. You'll work close to production — designing prompts and tool flows, building eval suites, shipping changes, watching what breaks, and iterating fast. - Build and operate AI agents in production: Design, implement, and maintain agentic systems powered by LLMs — handling tool calling, multi-step reasoning, and integration with customer APIs and data sources. You'll own these systems end-to-end: reliable, observable, and auditable from day one. - Translate business problems into agentic workflows: Work directly with enterprise customers to understand their workflows, surface the highest-leverage automation opportunities, and frame them as well-scoped agent problems with clear success criteria. You'll be the technical counterpart in customer conversations, turning ambiguity into a concrete plan. - Build robust evaluation infrastructure: Create and maintain eval suites drawn from real-world scenarios and edge cases. Go beyond vibes-based testing: structured evals measuring accuracy, safety, and latency, tied to clear business outcomes, used to drive systematic improvements to prompts, tools, and behaviour. - Enhance our agent: Develop, evaluate, and optimise the skills that make up our agent. Curate datasets, iterate on improvements, test changes, and ship successful approaches into production. - Shape our internal AI platform: Contribute to shared libraries, patterns, and standards for how we build, evaluate, and deploy agents across customers. Help define how we approach prompting, tool orchestration, retrieval, and monitoring. - Experiment and prototype: Keep up with the latest in NLP, agentic systems, and generative AI. Prototype against our hardest problems with a bias toward shipping experiments quickly rather than long research cycles. - Analyse data: Work across customer queries, support tickets, and related data to find patterns and identify what our agents could automate next. - Drive technical decisions: Scope your own work, push back when the framing is wrong, and tell us when the plan needs to change. 💡 WHAT YOU’LL BRING - 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a meaningful focus on Machine Learning, NLP, or applied AI. - End-to-end ownership of production systems: you've designed it, shipped it, watched it break, and iterated. You can point to specific moments where you drove a decision forward. - Hands-on experience shipping LLM-based features or agent systems into production, not just prototypes. Go experience a plus. - Strong Python skills: clean, testable, observable production-grade code. - You're always automating. Your default reaction to a repetitive task is to build something for it. - Comfort reasoning about trade-offs (accuracy vs latency, coverage vs precision, cost vs quality), framed around what matters to the user and the business. - A product-driven posture: you've worked closely with PMs, customers, or domain experts, and translated ambiguity into shipped solutions without needing a perfect spec. - A preference for fast iteration over long research cycles. WHY JOIN GRADIENT LABS? This is a unique chance to be part of a team working with cutting-edge technology to reshape how businesses will operate in the future. Over the next 10 years, every company will need to embrace AI-powered operations to stay competitive, and this role puts you right in the middle of that transformation. You’ll tackle challenging and new problems, work with some of the most exciting brands across different industries, and be surrounded by a passionate, smart team that’s driven to build something groundbreaking.