Senior AI Engineer

Macmillan is one of the Big 5 Publishers with mission-critical systems running royalties, distribution, and the supply chain that books move through from manuscript to consumer. Those systems cannot be turned off. They also cannot stay as they are. The organization has committed to a multi-year modernization of its core technology platforms, the build of a Publishing Operating System that enables imprints to operate more efficiently, and the productionization of AI capabilities across the publishing lifecycle.

This is a rare opportunity to help redefine the technology foundation of a global publishing company in the AI era.  This is a role for someone who has built and shipped AI-powered products at scale and now wants to shape the technical future of an industry that is being fundamentally transformed by AI. A link to a LinkedIn, GitHub, Hugging Face, or personal portfolio is mandatory for consideration for this role.

THE ROLE As a Senior AI Engineer (Full-Stack / Applications), you will design, build, and operate production-grade, cloud-native applications with AI at their core. This role sits at the intersection of strong software engineering and deep AI expertise, with a focus on turning state-of-the-art AI capabilities into robust, scalable, and high-quality user-facing products. This role prioritizes deep AI knowledge alongside strong software engineering skills to ensure an effective utilization of AI capabilities in production systems.

You will work across the full lifecycle of AI-powered systems: from evaluating and optimizing models, to integrating them into end-to-end applications, to deploying, monitoring, and iterating on them in production.  Candidates may bring deeper expertise in either application development or applied AI, and we value engineers who are excited to collaborate and grow across disciplines. We do not expect candidates to match every technology or qualification listed below.

Strong candidates will bring deep expertise in some areas alongside curiosity, adaptability, and strong collaboration skills. In this role you will be flexibly assigned to short-term PoC projects, mid-term rapid MVP projects and long-term product development, based on your skills, interests, and company priorities. Our current and future tech-stack: Google Cloud, AWS, Firebase, Python, Typescript, Django, Terraform, Github, Cloud Firestore, EventArc, PubSub, GCIP, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions v2, React, BigQuery, Github Actions, commercial AI services, Open Source AI Models, Langfuse, Snowflake, PostgreSQL.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING Own AI-powered features end-to-end, from scoping, design and requirements engineering to feature evaluation, deployment and operation. Design, build and maintain cloud-native, event-driven AI applications across the full stack. Evaluate, integrate, and optimize AI models for production use, balancing quality, latency, reliability and cost. Collaborate effectively with cross-functional team members, including non-technical stakeholders, to refine requirements and align technical solutions with business objectives.

Build and maintain robust AI inference, evaluation, and monitoring pipelines. Develop and implement robust, automated AI application evaluation frameworks. Analyze AI application performance data and experiments, using insights for data-driven improvements. Operate and improve production systems, taking ownership of reliability, quality, and technical debt. Stay current with AI advancements and share knowledge to upskill the team.

Plan, track, and break down work effectively in an agile team. Provide technical leadership, drive design reviews, write ADRs and contribute to hiring and onboarding. Participate in on-call rotations, incident response and post-mortems for AI-powered systems and help define SLOs and error budgets. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR Pragmatic, result-oriented analytical problem solving skills that can overcome ambiguity.

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