Senior AI Engineer

At Hiire, we're partnering with a fast-growing, international startup that's transforming how financial institutions verify, understand and continuously monitor businesses.

Our client is building a next-generation compliance and business intelligence platform, combining large-scale data, machine learning and agentic AI to automate complex processes and enable smarter, faster decision-making.

Backed by an experienced founding team with backgrounds in some of the world's leading fintech and technology companies, the business is already working with major financial institutions and is entering an exciting stage of growth.

With engineering teams across Porto and London, our client offers the opportunity to work on technically challenging products, contribute to architectural decisions and see the direct impact of your work.

We're now looking for a Senior Machine Learning / AI Engineer to help build and scale the intelligent systems powering this platform.

The Role

This isn't about building AI prototypes that never make it into production.

It's about designing, developing and deploying real-world AI solutions that solve complex challenges in financial services.

You'll work at the intersection of Machine Learning, NLP, Large Language Models and AI Agents, helping transform large volumes of structured and unstructured business information into actionable intelligence.

You'll join a collaborative engineering environment where technical ownership, experimentation and pragmatic problem-solving are encouraged.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design, develop and deploy machine learning and AI solutions to support business verification, risk assessment and compliance workflows.

• Build LLM-powered applications and AI agents to automate complex information processing and decision-making.

• Develop NLP pipelines to extract, classify and structure information from multiple data sources.

• Work with large-scale datasets to identify patterns, relationships and relevant business insights.

• Develop and optimise machine learning pipelines, from experimentation through production deployment.

• Evaluate and improve model performance, accuracy, reliability, latency and cost.

• Collaborate with backend engineers and product teams to integrate AI capabilities into scalable applications.

• Contribute to architectural discussions, technical decisions and engineering best practices.

• Explore emerging AI technologies and identify opportunities to apply them to real business challenges.

What We're Looking For

• Strong professional experience in Machine Learning Engineering, Applied AI or a related field.

• Excellent programming skills in Python.

• Hands-on experience with NLP and Large Language Models (LLMs).

• Experience developing and deploying machine learning or AI-powered applications in production.

• Familiarity with AI Agents, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), embeddings or semantic search.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and an understanding of scalable system design.

• Experience working with cloud infrastructure and modern development practices.

• Ability to approach complex problems independently and translate technical solutions into business value.

• Strong communication skills and fluency in English.

Nice to Have

• Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex or similar frameworks.

• Knowledge of vector databases and information retrieval techniques.

• Experience with LLM evaluation, fine-tuning or model optimisation.

• Familiarity with MLOps, monitoring and model deployment.

• Experience with entity resolution, knowledge graphs or large-scale data processing.

• Previous experience in fintech, financial services, compliance or fraud prevention.

What's in It for You?

Real-world AI challenges: Build intelligent systems that are used in production and solve meaningful problems in financial services.

Technical ownership: Have a genuine voice in engineering decisions, architecture and the evolution of the product.

International collaboration: Work alongside experienced engineers and product professionals across Porto and London.

Innovation with purpose: Explore emerging AI technologies while focusing on practical applications and measurable impact.

Career growth: Join a growing business where you'll have the opportunity to take on greater responsibility and develop alongside the company.

Hybrid flexibility: Enjoy a collaborative working environment with two days per week in the Porto office.