Staff AI Developer Productivity Engineer

Abyssal S.A; City of London; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A financial technology firm in London is seeking a Staff AI Developer Productivity Engineer to enhance developer productivity through AI integration and tooling. You'll work hands-on to identify bottlenecks, experiment with cutting-edge AI technologies, and manage the development of internal tools. Ideal candidates have significant experience in software engineering and a track record of improving developer experiences. The role supports a hybrid working model with competitive benefits.

Benefits

A competitive salary benchmarked against a peer group

25 days holiday per year + your birthday off

Free onsite Nuffield Health gym & pool

Bupa Private Healthcare

Life Assurance Policy - x3 annual salary

Enhanced Parental Policies

Complimentary tea, coffee, soft drinks and fruit

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering with a track record of building internal developer tooling.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js, C#/.NET, and front-end experience with React/Next.js.
• Hands-on LLM integration: prompting, tool/function calling, and basic evaluation of quality.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD, test strategy, and code-quality tooling.
• Excellent communication and influence skills.

Responsibilities

• Identify bottlenecks across the developer lifecycle and build internal tools.
• Experiment with cutting-edge AI technologies to enhance delivery speed.
• Manage discovery, roadmap, and backlog while running data-driven trials.
• Drive adoption of AI tools with playbooks and demos.

Job description

About us

Over the last 18 years, we have helped over a million satisfied customers move and manage their money. Our award-winning product portfolio allows our customers to make low-cost multi-currency payments across various payment products. From travel money to transfers, currency hedging, to expense management, we are focused on a single goal of making it easy for our customers to manage and move their money.

As a business, we are committed to delivering value to our customers through the combination of advanced payments technology and personal expert service. We’re doing this by hiring exceptional people and are now looking for a Staff AI Developer Productivity Engineer to join our team.

Within our offices in London, Chester and Los Angeles and Europe, Equals comprises three business lines and brands - Equals Money, FairFX and CardOneMoney. You will join a very close-knit, talented and supportive team from various backgrounds who believe that bringing different perspectives together helps us understand our customers needs. United, by one thing, making money management straightforward and cost-effective for our customers.

About the role

This is a staff-level, hands-on role at the intersection of Developer Productivity, Developer Experience (DevEx) and AI. You’ll accelerate a 100+ engineer organisation by identifying bottlenecks across the developer lifecycle and build and ship internal tools that measurably improve delivery speed and quality.

You’ll operate with an AI-first mindset: rapidly experiment with cutting-edge AI technologies and agentic flows to see what’s possible today, map the frontier and forecast capabilities likely to become viable in the next 3-6 months. When AI isn’t the right fit, you’ll pragmatically fall back to conventional solutions.

You’ll self-manage discovery, roadmap and backlog; run short, data-driven trials and productionise solutions which work. You’ll partner closely with Engineering and DevOps teams to ensure changes integrate cleanly into existing workflows.

About you

We believe that certain skills are essential in order to be successful in this role and these are detailed below. You may not have all the other skills we have outlined as desirable, we understand that and will still welcome your application. We will carry out individual interviews for shortlisted candidates and assess who is best suited for the role after we have discussed everything with you.

Responsibilities

• AI-first discovery roadmap - Interview engineers, analyse telemetry and prioritise the highest-leverage opportunities across coding, review, testing, releases and knowledge flows. Set baselines and target deltas and maintain a transparent backlog/roadmap grounded in measurable outcomes.
• Ship internal tools - Build and maintain AI-augmented dev tools across IDE/CLI, GitHub, Slack, Notion, Retool and internal web apps that reduce manual effort and cycle time.
• Agentic flows across the SDLC - Design structured, agentic workflows (including MCP and tool-use with human-in-the-loop gates) to improve code authoring/review, test creation/selection and the release, incident response and onboarding processes.
• Frontier scouting & evaluation - Continuously experiment with cutting-edge AI models, frameworks and runtimes; run short, hypothesis-driven pilots with clear success criteria and developer-fit assessments; productionise successful approaches.
• Automation pipelines - Implement LLM-assisted and AST-based code-mod workflows for migrations, boilerplate generation, test creation and docs updates.
• Enablement & change management - Drive adoption with playbooks, golden prompts, demos, office hours and a champions network across build teams; measure usage and satisfaction and iterate.

Accountabilities

• Measurable impact - Reduced cycle time for new features.
• Quality & reliability - Improved stability; fewer defects and incidents attributable to code changes.
• Adoption & enablement - Growth in weekly active users of AI and other dev tools; strong satisfaction with guidance, prompts and enablement materials.
• Developer satisfaction - Higher engineer NPS and engagement
• Operational excellence - Well-maintained internal tools with monitoring, docs and responsive support; clear deprecation paths for experiments that don’t meet the bar.

Essential Skills

• 8+ years in software engineering with a track record of building internal developer tooling/DevEx (CLI/IDE plugins, bots, internal services or web apps).
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js, C#/.NET and front-end experience with React/Next.js.
• Hands-on LLM integration: prompting, tool/function calling, retrieval (embeddings/vector stores) and basic evaluation of quality.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD, test strategy and code-quality tooling; able to design fast inner loops and reliable pipelines.
• Product mindset: discovery interviews, hypothesis-driven experiments, before/after evaluation and clear business cases.
• Excellent communication and influence skills; comfortable enabling teams via docs, workshops and remote office hours.
• A role model for our values:
  • Make it happen
  • Succeed together
  • Be the customer
  • Go beyond

Desirable Skills

• Experience administering/rolling out AI coding tools (Copilot, Cursor) and code search.
• Familiarity with structured/agentic AI workflow frameworks for multi-step tasks.
• Observability for developer platforms (metrics, tracing, dashboards) and performance tuning of AI workloads.
• Evaluation techniques for LLM output quality (human-in-the-loop, rubric scoring, golden datasets).
• Experience with GitHub, Slack, Notion and Retool.
• Background in fintech/payments or other regulated domains.

Our investment in you

We welcome people into Equals and desire to grow and develop our talented teams. We believe in teamwork and celebrating our successes. We strive to embrace our values. We want to put you in the driving seat of your career and achieve your full potential through growth opportunities and developmental support.

When you join Equals, we aim to help you to get more out of your career. We will also offer you the following benefits;

Benefits

• A competitive salary benchmarked against a peer group.
• 25 days holiday per year + your birthday off
• Opportunities for progression, development and learning new skills - £250 towards the cost of learning & development.
• Free onsite Nuffield Health gym & pool (London) and discounted gym membership elsewhere
• GetActive with Aviva - Health and Wellbeing discounts on services and products
• Interbank currency rates on travel money and international transfers.
• Bupa Private Healthcare
• Free Eye Test and £50 up to the cost of glasses
• EAP Service - Mental Health Services
• Life Assurance Policy - x3 annual salary
• Contributory pension scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Season Ticket Loans
• Enhanced Parental Policies
• Complimentary tea, coffee, soft drinks and fruit
• We operate a hybrid working arrangement where possible

Where possible we offer the opportunity to work flexibly and the opportunity to balance some remote working with time in the office collaborating, taking part in events and developing the social connections that make working with us rewarding.

Equals strives to create a workplace where we can all be ourselves. We believe in inclusion, equality and the power of diversity, so you’ll be encouraged to bring your unique perspectives and experiences, and help us understand what you need to do your best work.

No agency support required at this time - thank you.