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# AI Engineer (Backend)

- **Company:** Duffel
- **Location:** UK
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Artificial Intelligence, Customer Data Management, TypeScript, Large Language Models, Prompt Engineering, Backend, Front End Software Development, Elixir
- **Published:** July 26, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.totaljobs.com/job/ai-engineer/duffel-job107749580

## About the Role

* 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.

## Description

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.
What you'll get to do

 * 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.


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