Principal Software Engineer (AI and Engineering)
Ocho People | Technology Recruitment
At a Glance
- Principal level AI engineering leadership role at a Fortune 500 payments technology company processing billions of transactions across 175 plus countries
- Define and drive the AI strategy across an entire engineering organisation — not just one team
- Hands on technical authority, strategic advisor, mentor and change agent
- Hybrid working, Belfast based
- Salary up to £95,000
Why This Organisation
Our client is a leading payments technology and software company powering commerce for businesses of all sizes worldwide. They manage trillions in payments volume and billions of transactions annually across more than 175 countries. Their Belfast engineering team works on high-throughput, mission-critical payment infrastructure with 100% uptime as the standard, serving customers from small businesses to some of the largest venues and organisations in the world.
This is a Fortune 500 business with the scale, the investment and the ambition to build something genuinely significant in Belfast. The AI strategy role being created here is a recognition that engineering teams working at this scale need principled, experienced technical leadership to navigate AI adoption responsibly and effectively. If you are a principal level engineer who wants to shape how AI is used across an entire engineering organisation, this is a rare opportunity.
The Role and What It Can Do For Your Career
This is a Principal Software Engineer and AI thought leader role with remit across the integrated engineering organisation. You will define AI strategy, identify and prioritise high impact AI opportunities, accelerate AI maturity across teams, champion responsible adoption and coach engineers to think AI-first where it genuinely improves outcomes. You will combine deep hands-on engineering expertise with strategic influence — this is not a purely advisory or management position. You will remain close to the technical work while operating at the level of the organisation.
The career value is the scope. Principal level AI strategy roles at globally significant technology companies do not come along often in Belfast. You will be shaping how hundreds of engineers adopt AI across product experiences, developer productivity, quality engineering, operations and platform modernisation — leaving a legacy that outlasts any single delivery. The combination of technical authority, mentoring remit and strategic influence at this scale builds a profile that is genuinely rare in the local market.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and lead the AI strategy for the integrated engineering organisation, aligned to business priorities, product direction, architecture principles, security and measurable outcomes
- Identify, prioritise and validate high impact AI opportunities across engineering workflows, developer productivity, quality engineering, operations, platform modernisation and partner ecosystems
- Accelerate organisational AI maturity by fostering collaboration, growing internal AI communities and expanding awareness of AI capabilities across engineering and operations
- Champion responsible and secure AI adoption ensuring solutions account for data protection, privacy, reliability, explainability, observability and regulatory expectations
- Lead AI engineering enablement by establishing standards, reusable patterns, reference architectures, evaluation approaches and knowledge sharing forums
- Coach and mentor engineers to adopt AI-first thinking where it improves outcomes while maintaining strong engineering discipline and quality
- Embed quality throughout the software lifecycle by promoting observable, testable, reliable and supportable AI-enabled engineering outcomes
- Improve engineering effectiveness through applied AI, automation, simplification, modern tooling and continuous improvement
What You Will Need
Essential:
- Strong hands-on engineering background with experience building, deploying and scaling production-ready software applications and AI-powered products
- Experience implementing AI and ML operational practices including CI and CD, automation, data governance and real-time data processing solutions
- Understanding of responsible AI practices including governance, security, privacy, risk assessment, testing, monitoring, human oversight and auditability
- Hands-on experience identifying and resolving performance and scalability issues across distributed application architectures and databases
- Experience with web services including SOAP and RESTful endpoint creation and authentication
- Strong understanding of database design, design patterns, refactoring, object-oriented design and modern software development best practice
- Experience working in Agile Scrum or Lean Kanban environments
- Exceptional communication, stakeholder management and storytelling skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences
- Degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence or a related field
Nice to Have:
- Payments domain expertise
- Experience with NLP, conversational AI agents or LLM application development frameworks
- Knowledge of cloud and data platforms
Why You Should Apply Now
Principal level AI engineering roles with genuine organisational scope — defining strategy, shaping adoption and mentoring at scale — are exceptional in Belfast. This is a Fortune 500 company at the cutting edge of payments technology, with the investment and ambition to do AI properly. The salary reflects the level of the role and the impact expected.
Salary up to £95,000. Hybrid working from Belfast.
