Job Description

Senior Software Engineer - AI Team

Department: AI

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Belfast

Who are we?

At Bright, we've engineered cutting-edge software for accounting, payroll, tax, and practice management. We've assembled a team of top talent and stand ready to lead the industry with our superior software solutions and unparalleled customer support.

We're brilliant people creating brilliant software! Join us in our mission to create brilliant software that empowers businesses to reach new heights.

Our Products:

Our award-winning software helps small businesses and accountants across Ireland and the UK manage their payroll, accounts and HR practices. We take the headache out of business management and provide cost effective, real solutions to accountants and business owners.

The Role:

As a Senior Software Engineer at Bright, you'll join a small, high-impact team building AI-powered features for our products. We're not building chatbots. We're building systems that automate end-to-end accounting workflows from document processing through to statutory filing to make a real impact on tens of thousands of our customers. Working in a self-contained squad with the autonomy to make commercial and technical decisions without being weighed down by bureaucracy, you'll be responsible for architecting and building production-grade AI solutions that solve real problems for our users. As a senior member of the team, you'll set technical direction, mentor others, and drive quality across the full stack.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Delivery

• Architect and implement scalable, production-ready AI-powered applications from front-end to back-end
• Design and build performant, secure back-end services that integrate with our AI platform
• Create user-friendly front-end interfaces for AI features using modern JavaScript frameworks or C# and Blazor
• Lead technical decision-making within your squad, balancing innovation with pragmatic delivery
• Drive best practices in code quality, testing, security, and observability

AI Integration & Development

• Collaborate closely with the AI platform team to design and deliver compelling AI-first features and products
• Integrate AI capabilities seamlessly into existing Bright products, ensuring smooth user experiences
• Build responsive, intuitive UI components that make complex AI functionality accessible to end users
• Optimize AI service performance, cost, and reliability in production environments

Quality & Continuous Improvement

• Write clean, maintainable, well-tested code with comprehensive documentation
• Configure and maintain CI/CD pipelines with automated testing and deployment
• Identify opportunities for process improvements and contribute to enhancement of development practices, testability, tools, code health and maintainability across the engineering community
• Foster a collaborative environment by working closely within cross-functional teams to ensure high-quality software delivery

Mentorship & Culture

• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineers
• Contribute to architectural decisions and technical strategy
• Help shape team culture and engineering standards

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Full stack software engineering experience building production applications for the web.
• Proven production experience building software powered by LLMs/GenAI/ML models - not demos or prototypes, but real systems serving users
• Strong full-stack capability with expertise in:
• Modern JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Angular, etc.) or Blazor for front-end development
• C# .NET for back-end services
• RESTful API design and implementation
• HTML5, CSS3, and responsive design principles
• Cloud platform experience with Azure, AWS, or GCP
• Production systems mindset including observability, testing, security, and reliability
• Agile delivery experience in fast-paced, iterative environments
• Strong collaboration and communication skills working effectively with technical and product stakeholders
• Architectural thinking - ability to design scalable systems and make strategic technical decisions

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Experience with multi-agent AI architectures where multiple specialized models collaborate to solve complex problems
• Hands-on experience with vector databases and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems
• Python proficiency for AI/ML development and data processing
• Experience with prompt engineering and LLM optimization
• Knowledge of MLOps practices and AI observability tools (e.g., Langfuse, LiteLLM)
• Understanding of cost optimization for AI systems in production
• Experience in B2B SaaS or domain-specific software (accounting, payroll, professional services)
• Track record of mentoring junior engineers and driving technical standards

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Learning Mindset You're excited to learn new frameworks, tools and practices, particularly when it comes to AI. You stay current with emerging technologies and best practices.
• Systems Thinking You understand how distributed systems work and can reason about failure modes, performance bottlenecks, and architectural trade-offs.
• Pragmatic Approach You balance perfect solutions with shipping value quickly. You understand when to optimize and when "good enough" enables faster learning.
• Commercial Awareness You think about cost implications, customer value, and margin creation in your technical decisions.
• Collaboration You work well with both technical and product stakeholders. You communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences.
• Ownership You take responsibility for your work from conception through development to production. You follow through on commitments and drive results.
• Hunter Mentality You see opportunities, not just problems. You bring energy, optimism, and a can-do attitude to challenges.
• Technical Excellence You care deeply about code quality, testing, and building systems that are maintainable and reliable.

Benefits

What will you get?

• Competitive salary
• Performance based bonus
• 25 days annual leave
• Health Insurance
• Company pension
• Company events
• free food onsite
• On-site parking
• Referral programme
• Sick pay
• Wellness programmes