AI Engineer (Agentic Systems)

About ISx4

ISx4 is a dynamic and innovative team, we harness the power of artificial intelligence and cloud computing to drive real-world impact. We work at the forefront of AI technology, leveraging leading cloud platforms to build scalable, intelligent solutions. We provide Insight through Strategy, Solutions, Services & Support (Sx4). Our industry experience help derive competitive advantage for our clients, taking them on the journey from Hindsight, through Insight to Foresight.

We create, deliver and manage Analytics and AI solutions across all sectors including finance, government, life sciences, private sector and sport. Our services are increasingly in demand as Analytics and AI services become a core competency in every area of the business. ISx4 are formal certified partners with Microsoft, AWS, GCP, SAS, IBM and Databricks and have customers & staff located globally. These strategic partnerships allow us to remain vendor-neutral and focused on our core competency area of analytics services delivery. ISx4 have an ambitious hiring plan for the next few years with new hires at all levels to support the strategic growth of the firm.

The Role

We're looking for an AI Engineer to help build and run customer-facing AI agent capabilities in production. You'll work in a team of highly skilled engineers delivering reliable, secure, and observable agent-driven workflows. Our orchestration backbone is Akka (Java), deployed on AWS, with top observability/evaluation platform and Postgres + pgvector for retrieval.

This is an engineering-first role: you'll focus on distributed systems, orchestration, robustness, and production operations—bringing AI agent components into a dependable runtime.

What You'll Do

• Build and operate customer-facing services that incorporate AI agents and tool-using workflows
• Develop orchestration/runtime components using Akka (Java) (actors/streams, supervision strategies, backpressure, concurrency)
• Integrate retrieval components using Postgres + pgvector (query patterns, latency considerations, embedding/retrieval flows)
• Instrument, monitor, and improve agent quality using observability tools (quality signals, evaluation/regression tracking, incident triage)
• Engineer for reliability and safety: timeouts, retries, idempotency, graceful degradation, auditability, and secure service integration
• Collaborate with product/engineering stakeholders to translate requirements into robust designs, delivery plans, and runbooks

Must-Have Requirements

• Eligible and willing to pass relevant background checks
• PhD or Master's degree in Computer Science / AI / Data Science / Machine Learning / Engineering (or equivalent practical experience)
• At least 3+ years post-graduate experience delivering production software systems and building and operating scalable backend/distributed systems (high-concurrency services, reliability patterns, production operations)
• Strong Java engineering skills and experience with concurrent/distributed systems
• Experience building customer-facing services with high reliability expectations (timeouts, retries, observability, performance)
• Familiarity with AWS fundamentals for deploying and operating services (including security/IAM awareness)
• Strong engineering practices: testing, code review, CI/CD, documentation, and operational readiness

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with Akka in production (actors/streams; reliability patterns such as supervision)
• Python experience (useful for integrating AI/agent tooling and adjacent components)
• Experience with LLM/agentic systems (tool calling, structured outputs, evaluation practices)
• Experience with Arize (or similar ML/LLM observability tooling)
• Experience with Postgres + pgvector and retrieval optimisation
• Containerisation/orchestration (Docker, ECS/EKS/Kubernetes)
• Security-by-design experience for AI systems (PII handling, prompt injection mitigation, least privilege, audit trails)

What We Offer

• Work on a state of the art high profile, production AI system with modern runtime and observability practices
• A collaborative Northern Ireland-based engineering team with hybrid flexibility
• Competitive package and professional growth opportunities

Hiring Process

• Intro call
• Technical interview (Java/Akka + systems design)
• Final conversation (team fit + security requirements)