Job description
Senior Lead, AI Engineering, GDBS
Company Overview
South 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. Our Corporate Functions team is the “enablement engine” of South Pole.
Job Summary
South 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. This is a hands-on engineering role pitched at a medior-to-senior level.
Key Responsibilities
- AI Feature Development: Design and ship LLM-powered features end to end - retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), structured extraction, summarisation, and agentic / tool-using workflows.
- Pipelines & 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).
- Evaluation & Reliability: Stand up evaluation, monitoring, and guardrails so AI features are measurably accurate, safe, and stable - not just impressive in a demo.
- Performance & Cost: Optimise latency, token usage, and throughput; apply caching, batching, and model-routing to keep large workloads fast and economical.
- Quality Assurance: Champion rigorous testing and pull-request discipline to prevent regressions and keep deployments stable.
- Collaboration: 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.
Technical Requirements - Core Stack
AI & Machine Learning
- LLM Engineering: Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs (e.g. Anthropic, OpenAI, or Vertex AI / Gemini) - prompt design, function/tool calling, and structured outputs.
- RAG & Retrieval: Practical knowledge of embeddings, chunking, and vector search (pgvector, or a managed vector DB).
- Frameworks: Familiarity with at least one orchestration framework (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent), and comfort working without one when it's simpler.
- Evaluation: Awareness of LLM evaluation, hallucination mitigation, and basic red-teaming of AI outputs.
Back-end & Data
- Back-end: Strong Python (FastAPI / Flask / Django), with clean, testable, production-oriented code.
- Database: Solid PostgreSQL - comfortable with relations, indices, constraints, and transactions beyond basic ORM usage.
- Data: Experience handling large, high-volume datasets and streaming / batch processing.
Systems & Cloud-Native Architecture
- Cloud: Experience with GCP (Vertex AI, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub) or a comparable cloud platform.
- Event-Driven Design: Proficiency with queues and Pub/Sub for asynchronous, event-driven workflows.
- DevOps Fundamentals: Working knowledge of CI/CD workflows and containerisation (Docker; Kubernetes a plus).
- Security: Sound practices around authentication, authorisation, throttling, and handling of sensitive and proprietary data in AI workflows.
Communication Skills
- Proficiency in business English. Ability to translate complex technical and AI concepts into understandable terms for non-technical business colleagues.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with MLOps / model lifecycle tooling, or fine-tuning.
- Exposure to front-end work (React / Next.js) for AI-facing interfaces.
- Interest in climate, carbon markets, or sustainability data.
The Ideal Candidate Profile
- Proactive 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.
- Pragmatic 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.
- Independent: You can take a high-level requirement and turn it into a fully functional, tested, evaluated feature with minimal oversight.
- Responsible 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.
What we offer
At 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.
Equal Opportunity Statement
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.
