Lead AI Engineer

Fourth is the world’s largest and fastest-growing global leader of end-to-end restaurant and hospitality management technology solutions. We pride ourselves on delivering a world-class SaaS experience for our clients by building long term partnerships starting from the first phone call. We know our recipe for success at Fourth is our amazing team… and that starts with hiring the right people!

Interested in joining our smart, fun, and talented team?

We are looking for a senior, hands-on Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and productionize AI solutions used across Fourth’s enterprise operations.

This role owns the technical foundations for AI in production – ensuring solutions are scalable, reliable, well-governed, and integrated with enterprise data and systems. You will report to the Director of Enterprise Data & Intelligence and sit at the forefront of reshaping how Fourth operates as a business, starting hands-on with production AI systems and growing into a standards-setting technical leader defining the architecture, governance, and direction for AI across the entire enterprise.

What’s in it for you:

• Enterprise-wide impact beyond a single product
• Real ownership of production AI architecture and engineering decisions from day one
• The challenge of connecting internal services, data platforms, and third-party systems into coherent, reliable AI solutions
• Opportunity to set the standards and patterns as AI scales across Fourth
• A high-visibility role in a fast-moving, technically ambitious team

Responsibilities:

• Own AI engineering and architectural decisions across enterprise solutions – system design, integration patterns, API contracts, and trade-off reasoning
• Design and build production-grade AI systems and pipelines; take solutions from prototype to reliable production
• Define engineering standards, quality bars, and production readiness criteria
• Shape feasibility, prioritisation, and technical approach for AI initiatives in partnership with the Director
• Translate business problems into scoped, technically sound AI solutions
• Review and harden solutions built by others; mentor junior AI engineers
• Work with Data, Security, Legal, and Compliance on safe, governed AI delivery

Requirements:

• 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience, with at least 3 years owning production AI/ML systems end-to-end – not model development alone, but full delivery lifecycle including deployment and ongoing operations
• Demonstrable experience making and owning architectural decisions: system design, integration patterns, and solution trade-offs – not just implementing designs handed to you by others
• Hands-on production experience with LLM-based systems: RAG architectures, embeddings, vector search, and the operational realities of running LLMs at scale – latency, cost, failure modes, and observability
• Strong Python engineering skills for production AI services; candidates with equivalent depth in other languages will be considered where AI engineering experience is strong
• Hands-on CI/CD experience for AI/ML systems: automated testing, model validation, deployment pipelines, and rollback strategies
• Cloud infrastructure ownership (Azure preferred): able to design and deploy, not just consume managed services; familiarity with containerisation and infrastructure-as-code
• Track record of owning AI services post-deployment – not just shipping, but keeping them running reliably in production: monitoring, alerting, logging, and incident response
• Experience defining technical standards and raising the quality bar across a team – not just individual delivery
• Working knowledge of AI governance, access control, and responsible AI practices

Benefits and Culture:

· 25+ days off, as well as birthday day off and 4 charity days off per year

· Flexible start and end of the working day and hybrid working mode, including a combination remote and in the office

· Team-centric atmosphere

· Encouraging healthy lifestyle and work-life balance including supplemental health insurance

· New parents bonus scheme

*Only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

All personal data provided by you in your application will be processed by Fourth Bulgaria EOOD, UIC 203576042, solely for our recruitment purposes. If you do not provide your personal data, Fourth Bulgaria EOOD will not be able to review your application. Fourth Bulgaria will transfer your personal data only within its corporate group and to companies which provide recruitment support to Fourth Bulgaria. Fourth Bulgaria will ensure you can exercise your rights to access, correction and erasure of your personal data. More information on Fourth Bulgaria’s privacy policy for job candidates is available here: https://uk.fourth.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/06/Candidate-Notice-Bulgaria-May-2018-Bilingual.pdf and by applying you confirm that you have read it.