Fresha on cord

Fresha

Senior Applied AI Engineer

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Fresha?
Wellness · Marketplace · Retail Technology
The top-rated destination for beauty and wellness
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
6 days ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
18 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: AI Engineer
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: Artificial Intelligence, Kafka, Kubernetes
Other skills considered: Typescript, Elixir

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 1 remote day p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

You 9ll join a cross-functional product team and report to its Team Lead. The team builds AI products that Fresha's partners and their clients use directly: today that means an AI receptionist that answers a salon's phone, books appointments and hands off to a human when it should, and the support tooling around it.

This is a hybrid role: half senior backend engineer, half applied AI engineer. The AI is only as good as the system around it. A model that gives a great answer is no use if the booking it promises doesn't exist, the call drops when a downstream service is slow, or nobody can tell whether last week's prompt change made things better or worse. You'll own both halves.

We work on a short feedback loop. Your change usually reaches production the same day you write it, behind a feature flag. The team that builds a service looks after it, including a shared on-call rota. Everyone on the team works across the whole stack; there's no "AI person" and "backend person".

Every engineer gets Claude, Codex or Cursor from day one, and people build their own agent workflows rather than being handed one. We look for engineers who know how to break work up, how to review what comes back, and how to stand behind the result.


What You'll Do

  • Own AI features end to end: Design it, build it, evaluate it, ship it, and look after it once real customers are talking to it.
  • Build the system around the model: The services, tools and integrations an agent needs to do real work: checking availability, making bookings, taking payments, escalating to a human. Correct when it retries, safe when it's wrong.
  • Prove it works: Build the evals, graders and production checks that tell us whether a change made the product better. Treat them as part of the product, with their own accuracy you measure and improve.
  • Engineer the context: Decide what the model knows, what tools it has and how they're described. Most quality gains come from here, not from the prompt.
  • Work in real time: Voice and chat run on tight latency budgets. You'll balance model choice, cost, latency and quality, and keep all four in view.
  • Learn from real conversations: Read transcripts, instrument runs end to end (traces, cost, latency, outcomes), and turn what you find into the next change.
  • Work with the rest of the team: Product, Design, Support and other engineering teams, from the first conversation through to release.
  • Have a say in how we build: Our architecture, our AI practices and our engineering practices aren't fixed. We expect senior engineers to push on all three.

Our stack: Elixir and TypeScript services, Postgres, Kafka for events, gRPC or GraphQL for synchronous calls, all running in Kubernetes. Our AI products are built on LLM APIs and agent frameworks such as LangGraph, with Twilio for telephony and ElevenLabs for speech, and connect to the rest of Fresha's platform through MCP and our own service APIs. Fresha's wider platform is Ruby, Elixir and TypeScript, so you'll read a lot of code you didn't write.


What We're Looking For

  • Experience: 5+ years building and running backend services in production.
  • Built with LLMs, not just used them: You've shipped a product on top of LLM APIs or an agent framework that real users depend on, and you've had to make it reliable. You know where models fail and how to design around it.
  • Evals: You've written evaluations for non-deterministic systems: test sets, graders, LLM-as-judge, and you know when to trust each. You'd rather measure than guess.
  • Context and tool design: You understand that what an agent knows and what tools it can call matter more than the prompt. Retrieval, tool design and MCP are familiar territory.
  • Correctness: You think about what happens when a request arrives twice, a downstream call times out halfway through, or an agent takes an action it shouldn't. You design for it rather than finding out later.
  • Distributed systems: You've built and run services at scale, and you know how they fail. Event-driven design with Kafka or equivalent is a plus.
  • Cost and latency: You know that the right model for a task depends on the task, and you keep spend and response time in view.
  • Product sense: You care whether customers get what they need, not just whether the code is clean. You're happy reading transcripts and talking to the people who use what you build.
  • AI in your workflow: You use AI coding tools day to day and have a clear view of where they help and where they don't. You've built your own workflows, and you review what comes back before it ships.
  • Languages: Strong in at least one backend language. We don't expect Elixir on day one, but we do expect you to pick things up fast.
  • Pragmatic: You'd rather use what exists than build something new, and you can tell the difference between a demo and a product people rely on.

Company Benefits

  • Thriving Scale Up with Boundless Opportunities: Fresha is a well-funded and rapidly growing scale up, offering immense potential for personal and professional growth. Join us at this exciting stage and be part of a journey where your career can skyrocket.

  • Competitive Compensation: We believe in recognising the value you bring to the table. Your salary will be competitive and commensurate with your experience.

  • Accelerated Career Development: Are you a high achiever ready to soar? At Fresha, we provide a fast-track career path for exceptional performers like you. Demonstrate your skills and dedication, and watch your career reach new heights with us.

  • Collaborate with Top Engineering Talent: Join our team and collaborate with some of the finest engineering minds in Europe. Fresha brings together talent from London, Warsaw, Pristina and beyond, creating an environment where innovation flourishes and ideas come to life.

  • Global Impact, Transforming an Industry: As a member of our team, you'll work on a global platform that is revolutionising a rapidly growing industry segment. Your contributions will shape the future and make a tangible impact on businesses worldwide.

  • Vibrant and Collaborative Culture: Join a company that exudes energy and fosters collaboration. Our vibrant company culture promotes teamwork, creativity, and open communication. You'll be part of a supportive community that values your ideas and encourages personal growth.

  • Engaging Social Events: We believe in celebrating successes and fostering strong bonds within our team. Enjoy company social events that provide an opportunity to unwind, connect with colleagues, and have fun together.

  • Work with Great People: Join an energetic team of professionals who are leaders in their respective fields. At Fresha, you'll be surrounded by driven individuals who are passionate about their work and strive for excellence.

Senior Applied AI Engineer at Fresha
Position posted 6 days ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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