Lead Engineer, AI & Platform

Tips: Provide a summary of the role, what success in the position looks like, and how this role fits into the organization overall.

The Role

We're looking for a Lead Engineer, AI & Platform who wants to build, not just maintain. You'll be the most senior technical contributor on the team, owning key parts of the platform end to end, setting technical direction, and leading how we bring AI into real production workflows and customer-facing features.

The work spans high-volume payments, venue and POS integrations, data, platform reliability and AI-powered product, all used by thousands of people at once on event days. You'll work directly with the CEO and alongside our development team. This is a hands-on, high-impact role at a startup, perfect for someone who wants real ownership and a big say in where the platform goes next.

The role is based at our NovaUCD office in Dublin, with flexibility for remote working within Ireland.

What you'll own

• Architecture, reliability and performance of the platform on Google Cloud.
• Ensuring the platform performs reliably during high-traffic event-day peaks.
• Payment flows including checkout, refunds, reconciliation and payouts.
• Integrations with POS, ticketing and third-party partner systems.
• The data layer that brings together transaction, venue and customer data.
• Production AI features such as demand forecasting, venue insights and smarter ordering.
• AI evaluation, observability, latency and cost control.
• Engineering standards, code reviews and technical decision-making.
• Mentoring engineers and contributing to technical hiring as the team grows.

What you'll bring

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant ownership of production systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with TypeScript / JavaScript and Node.js, and building modern applications with React, React Native, Svelte or Vue.
• Strong backend and API design experience, including integrating external APIs and third-party platforms.
• Experience with SQL databases, ideally PostgreSQL, and working knowledge of NoSQL systems.
• Strong cloud experience, preferably with Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience designing systems for high traffic, concurrency and real-time operational requirements.
• Strong understanding of architecture, testing, observability and deployment practices.
• Experience working with payment systems, including refunds, reconciliation and production edge cases.
• Experience shipping AI or LLM-powered functionality to real users, using approaches such as LLM APIs, tool calling, RAG or agentic workflows, and judging them on reliability, latency, cost and business value.
• Strong debugging skills across application, infrastructure and third-party integrations.
• A pragmatic mindset, high ownership and the confidence to make architecture decisions independently and explain them clearly.

Must have

• Based in Ireland, with the ability to work with the team in Dublin when required.
• Fluent professional English.
• Experience working collaboratively within an engineering team.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with Stripe or other payment platforms such as PayPal, Square or Clover.
• Exposure to POS, hospitality, venue or ticketing integrations.
• Familiarity with Firebase, Docker, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code.
• Domain background in hospitality, live events, ticketing, marketplaces, fintech or commerce.
• Knowledge of forecasting, recommendation systems or operational intelligence.
• Experience with AI developer tooling.
• Startup or scale-up experience, particularly in environments with high ownership and fast iteration.

The kind of engineer we're looking for

You'll probably enjoy this role if you like combining technical ownership with hands-on development. You should be comfortable moving between designing a system, writing production code, reviewing a pull request, investigating a production issue and experimenting with a new AI capability.

We're looking for someone who can move quickly, make sensible trade-offs and care about both the quality of the engineering and the commercial impact of what we build.

What we offer

• €70–85k base salary
• Share options, so you own a piece of what you're building
• A senior role with real ownership in a company scaling across the UK, Australia and beyond
• Hybrid working, with flexibility to work remotely within Ireland
• On-site gym and parking at NovaUCD

How to apply

Send your CV and a few lines on something you've built that you're proud of to [email protected]