AI Engineer [Financial Assistant]

About the team: We are growing the Financial Assistant team at Plata, building intelligent systems that support users in managing their finances, understanding spending, and interacting with financial products in a simple and intuitive way. This team plays a key role in improving customer experience, engagement, and the overall value of our core products. This is a customer-facing product in a regulated environment — accuracy, safety, and trust are non-negotiable.

We use AWS, Go, Python and cloud-based models, yet still flexible to mix ready-made tools and ship our custom solutions. We're all about building systems that deliver real, valuable results for our organization.

You will be a key specialist in a cross-functional team, working closely with backend, mobile and other LLM engineers.

Challenges that await you:

• Work with agentic architectures where needed: tool use, multi-step reasoning, orchestration, and failure recovery

• Design and maintain eval infrastructure (offline test suites, golden datasets, regression harnesses) that gives a reliable signal after every change

• Work with advanced prompts, set up RAG-oriented data sources for efficient retrieval, and evaluate model outputs to ensure accuracy, relevance, and quality

• Implement safety and guardrails: hallucination detection, refusal strategies, factual grounding

• Run online and offline experiments ( canary, A/B) to validate that changes improve real user outcomes

• Own observability from day one: trace LLM calls, monitor quality drift, latency, and cost per session in production

• Collaborate with backend engineers and product to ship reliable improvements, review code, and maintain production health

What makes you a great fit:

• Strong classical ML fundamentals, you understand what's happening inside models, not just how to call their APIs

• Strong eval mindset: you design the measurement system before writing the first prompt, and treat evals as a first-class engineering artifact

• Hands-on experience with search and retrieval: dense/sparse/hybrid, reranking, query understanding — using managed tooling effectively, not necessarily from scratch

• Practical experience with agentic architectures: tool use, orchestration, failure recovery

• Safety-first thinking: guardrails, content policies, graceful degradation under uncertainty, especially in a context where wrong answers have real consequences

• Production ML ownership: observability, latency budgets, cost tracking, regression detection

• Expertise in Python and its ecosystem, as well as language- and framework-agnostic mindset to achieve project goals

• Familiarity with open-source tools to build and evaluate RAG applications.

• Excellent communication skills and ability to explain complex technical concepts to a broad audience of stakeholders

• B1 or higher English level for effective communication with an international team

Your bonus skills:

• Previous experience delivering business-critical ML/AI-powered applications for customer-facing products

• Fine-tuning or distillation of LLMs for production use cases

• Experience deploying open-source models (Llama, Mistral) in private/on-premise environments

• Experience in fintech, banking, or regulated domains

Our ways of working:

• Innovative Spirit: A commitment to creativity and groundbreaking solutions

• Honest Feedback: valuing open, transparent communication

• Supportive Team: a strong, collaborative community

• Celebrating Achievements: recognizing our wins together

• High-Tech Environment: a team full of smart and revolutionary people who date to challenge the status quo of incumbent finances

Our benefits:

• Relocation support to one of our hubs — Cyprus, Serbia, Spain, Georgia or Kazakhstan — with assistance for the employee and their family

• Flexible work from one of our offices or remotely within time zones from GMT-2 to GMT+5

• Healthcare Coverage

• Education Budget: Language lessons, professional training and certifications

• Wellness Budget: Mental health and fitness activity reimbursements

• Vacation policy: 20 days of annual leave and paid sick leave