Lead AI Engineer

Senior Agentic AI Engineer – Contract

Portugal | Cascais hybrid, around 2 days per week | Initial 3–6 month contract | €550–€650/day

A growing B2B SaaS business in the regulatory technology space is hiring a Senior Agentic AI Engineer to help design and build a new AI capability across its core product.

The business already has an established software platform and experienced engineering team. This contract will focus on shaping the architecture for a customer-facing AI assistant that can interact with existing product services, structured data, documents and workflow logic.

The longer-term product direction includes helping customers create and manage complex regulatory workflows through conversation, interpret changing requirements and use existing platform capabilities more intelligently.

The role

You’ll work closely with the core engineering team across both architecture and hands-on implementation.

Key areas of responsibility will include:

• Designing multi-step agent workflows
• Tool and function calling across existing APIs and backend services
• State and context management
• Retry, fallback and failure-recovery behaviour
• Human-in-the-loop controls
• Retrieval across structured and unstructured data
• Evaluation and regression testing
• Tracing, observability and production debugging
• Prompt and model versioning
• Guardrails, permissions and auditability
• Token-cost and latency management
• Integrating agentic AI into an existing production SaaS platform

What they’re looking for

You’ll need strong hands-on experience building AI agents that have reached production.

You should be comfortable discussing:

• how your agent architecture was structured
• how tools and APIs were exposed
• how state was managed
• how failures and retries were handled
• how outputs were evaluated
• how bad runs were traced and debugged
• how cost and latency were controlled
• what you learned once the system was being used in production

A strong software engineering background is essential.

Experience with Python and/or .NET, APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and databases will all be relevant.

Experience with LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, Pydantic AI, Azure AI Foundry or similar frameworks would be useful.

Experience in insurance, financial services, compliance, GRC or another regulated environment would also be valuable.

Contract details

• €550–€650/day
• Initial 3–6 month engagement
• Hybrid working from Cascais, around 2 days per week
• High level of ownership across architecture and implementation
• Direct collaboration with the core engineering team
• Right to work in Portugal required
• No sponsorship available