Senior Lead, AI Engineering, GDBS

ppSouth Pole is an energetic, global company offering comprehensive sustainability solutions and services. With offices spanning all continents across the globe, we strive to create a sustainable society and economy that positively impacts our climate, ecosystems and developing communities. With our solutions, we inspire and enable our customers to create value from sustainability-related activities. /p pOur Corporate Functions team is the “enablement engine” of South Pole. Behind the scenes, we provide the business with world‑class solutions and best practices that sustain business growth and success. We cover key areas such as Finance, HR, Office Management, Legal, IT, Operations, etc. If you are a smart, ambitious and dynamic professional with a strong passion to make a real difference in the fight against climate change, this position may be right for you! /p h3Job summary /h3 pSouth Pole is looking for an AI Developer to help build the intelligent layer behind our products. You will design, build, and ship production‑grade AI features: LLM‑powered workflows, retrieval pipelines, and agentic tooling that turn large, messy environmental and carbon‑market data into reliable answers. /p pThis is a hands‑on engineering role pitched at a medior‑to‑senior level. We are open to a strong medior developer ready to step up, as well as a senior who can take a vague requirement and turn it into a tested, well‑reasoned feature. What matters is that you understand the why behind your choices – not just how to call an API, but when not to, and how to keep an AI system trustworthy, evaluated, and cost‑aware in production. /p h3Key Responsibilities /h3 ul liAI Feature Development: Design and ship LLM‑powered features end to end – retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), structured extraction, summarisation, and agentic / tool‑using workflows. /li liPipelines Integration: Build robust data and inference pipelines that connect our AI layer to product back‑ends, vector stores, and source systems (AQ, Salesforce, Google Workspace). /li liEvaluation Reliability: Stand up evaluation, monitoring, and guardrails so AI features are measurably accurate, safe, and stable – not just impressive in a demo. /li liPerformance Cost: Optimise latency, token usage, and throughput; apply caching, batching, and model‑routing to keep large workloads fast and economical. /li liQuality Assurance: Champion rigorous testing and pull‑request discipline to prevent regressions and keep deployments stable. /li liCollaboration: Partner with the Tech Lead and product owners to translate business problems into AI solutions, and flag where a non‑AI approach is the better call. /li /ul h3Technical Requirements - Core Stack /h3 h3AI Machine Learning /h3 ul liLLM Engineering: Hands‑on experience building with LLM APIs (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI, or Vertex AI / Gemini) – prompt design, function/tool calling, and structured outputs. /li liRAG Retrieval: Practical knowledge of embeddings, chunking, and vector search (pgvector, or a managed vector DB). /li liFrameworks: Familiarity with at least one orchestration framework (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent), and comfort working without one when it's simpler. /li liEvaluation: Awareness of LLM evaluation, hallucination mitigation, and basic red‑team­ing of AI outputs. /li /ul h3Back‑end Data /h3 ul liBack‑end: Strong Python (FastAPI / Flask / Django), with clean, testable, production‑oriented code. /li liDatabase: Solid PostgreSQL – comfortable with relations, indices, constraints, and transactions beyond basic ORM usage. /li liData: Experience handling large, high‑volume datasets and streaming / batch processing. /li /ul h3Systems Cloud‑Native Architecture /h3 ul liCloud: Experience with GCP (Vertex AI, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub) or a comparable cloud platform. /li liEvent‑Driven Design: Proficiency with queues and Pub/Sub for asynchronous, event‑driven workflows. /li liDevOps Fundamentals: Working knowledge of CI/CD workflows and containerisation (Docker; Kubernetes a plus). /li liSecurity: Sound practices around authentication, authorisation, throttling, and handling of sensitive and proprietary data in AI workflows. /li /ul h3Communication Skills /h3 ul liProficiency in business English. /li liAbility to translate complex technical and AI concepts into understandable terms for non‑technical business colleagues. /li /ul h3Desirable Requirements /h3 ul liExperience with MLOps / model lifecycle tooling, or fine‑tuning. /li liExposure to front‑end work (React / Next.js) for AI‑facing interfaces. /li liInterest in climate, carbon markets, or sustainability data. /li /ul h3The Ideal Candidate Profile /h3 ul liProactive Communicator: You are proactive and communicative. In interviews you prefer a conversational approach – walking us through your reasoning and the trade‑offs behind your tech choices, rather than just providing the “correct” answer. /li liPragmatic Problem Solver: You don't just make a model work once; you find the root cause, build for reliability, and know when a simpler, non‑AI solution is the right one. /li liIndependent: You can take a high‑level requirement and turn it into a fully functional, tested, evaluated feature with minimal oversight. /li liResponsible by Default: You care about accuracy, safety, cost, and the trustworthiness of what you ship – a natural fit for a climate company where credibility matters. /li /ul h3What we offer /h3 pAt South Pole, we care about our employees as much as we care about the planet. South Pole is not just an employer, we are a Team. South Pole does not just offer people a job, we offer you a career. By joining our team, you will find strong purpose and deep meaning in everything you do. You will have the chance to make a real difference for our clients and for the planet, working alongside a passionate team of like‑minded colleagues, while building your knowledge/skills and developing your career in a fun, dynamic, international and fast‑growing organisation. /p h3Equal Opportunity Employer /h3 pWe’re a planet of 7.5 billion unique and different people. We all have a contribution to make and South Pole is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, marital status or disability. Our recruitment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need. /p /p #J-18808-Ljbffr