Duffel
AI Engineer (Backend)
2mo ago
EuropeSeniorRemotepythonmachine learningnlptensorflowpytorch
Senior AI Engineer (Backend) role to build AI-powered tools to improve travel experience at Duffel in London.
Requirements
- Significant experience shipping AI agents and LLM systems into production, with strong opinions on the modern toolkit — eval frameworks, agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, prompt engineering — and the tradeoffs between them.
- A track record of taking ambiguous problems from zero to one, raising the bar for the engineers around you, and shaping technical direction across teams.
- A strong general engineering foundation. We care more about your ability to design good systems than about any specific language or framework — you'll work across our stack as needed (Elixir on the backend, TypeScript on the frontend).
- Big picture thinking — you can make tradeoffs on technical work streams against business impact, and know when to ship something rough to learn from versus when to invest.
- Fantastic communication skills. You're able to articulate what you're working on and why to the team in a clear and structured way.
- You thrive in a collaborative environment. You believe in your own methods but keep an open mind, taking suggestions and feedback onboard as well.
- Bonus if you have experience in travel, flights, hotels or cars.
Conditions
- We’re a growth-focused team that values open communication, diverse perspectives, and true ownership. We want you to feel empowered in your role, which is why every permanent employee becomes a company shareholder.
- 🌍 Live Your Best Life
- Duffel Travel Allowance: We subsidise your wanderlust.
- Work From Anywhere (60 days): Your office, your rules.
- Sabbaticals: Long-term loyalty, long-term breaks.
- Flexible Bank Holidays: Swap holidays to suit your schedule.
- 🔋 Level Up & Give Back
- Study Days: Get paid to learn.
- Volunteering Day: One day a year to save the world.
- Electric Car & Cycle Schemes: Eco-friendly rides, tax-free prices.
- 🛡️ The Essentials, Upgraded
- Family Leave (maternity, paternity and adoption): Big support for life’s biggest moments, 26 weeks fully paid.
- Pensions & Loans: Future-proofing and interest-free commuting.
- Eye Tests: Keeping your vision (and your style) sharp.
Other
- 📍 London (Hybrid — 2 days onsite)
- 🕒 Permanent | Start ASAP
- 💼 Experience: Senior
- Whether it's to visit the people closest to us, starting an exciting adventure, or a career-defining business trip, travel is an essential part of our lives. Yet we've all experienced the aches and pains of getting to our destination. Today, more than 4 billion airline passengers rely on technology that hasn't kept up with the expectations of the modern connected traveller.
- That's why we've started to rebuild the infrastructure that underpins the travel industry. We're on a mission to unravel travel — simplifying systems and building the tools that will make the future of travel effortless. We were part of Y Combinator S18's cohort and we are backed by Benchmark, Blossom, Index Ventures and Kima Ventures. A fantastic set of investors that has helped build some of the world's largest companies.
- Our team in London is growing and we're looking for talented people to join us on our journey.
- Travel is one of the most demanding domains for AI. A single trip can span multiple airlines, hotels, payments, policies, and time zones — and when something goes wrong, travellers need answers fast. We're building a chat-based AI assistant that helps travellers manage trips booked through Duffel: changing a flight, understanding a fare rule, recovering from a disruption, getting a receipt — all the things that today mean a phone call or a long wait.
- Behind that experience sits a platform: the orchestration, retrieval, memory, and evaluation systems that let agents reason reliably over real bookings, real money, and real policies. As a senior AI Engineer, you'll help build that platform from the ground up and set the technical direction for how we build agents at Duffel.
- Design, ship, and own production-grade AI agents end-to-end — from intent through to taking action against Duffel's APIs — and define the agent development lifecycle the rest of the team will follow.
- Build the core platform that powers our agents: the orchestration engine, runtime, and primitives that define how agents reason, take actions, and interact with users — keeping them steerable and verifiable while staying conversational and adaptive.
- Make agents trustworthy. Build the retrieval and grounding systems that ensure responses are accurate, and the evaluation frameworks that let us measure and improve agent quality deliberately rather than vibes-first.
- Lay the foundations for memory and personalisation: long-term agent memory, reusable customer data primitives, and the optimisation loops that let agents personalise interactions and demonstrably lift business outcomes.
- 📍 Location: We are based in Shoreditch, London and have a hybrid work-from-home policy and require everyone to come to our office on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
- 📝 Interview Process: Our interview process consists of three stages: a recruiter screen, a hiring manager interview, and a final stage interview.
- ✔️ Background Checks: If you are successful, all offers will be pending satisfactory background checks (we partner with a third-party provider to do so) and employment references.