Lead AI Solutions Engineer

About the project

An international client engagement building an enterprise AI capability for a global professional services organisation. You will join a three-person core team (Enterprise AI Architect plus two Lead AI Solutions Engineers) and own a workstream end to end.

About the role

We are looking for a Lead AI Solutions Engineer to turn business knowledge into reliable, reusable AI skills that real users adopt. You will work directly with business stakeholders and domain experts, from the first conversation to a shipped, tested and adopted solution. This is a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of software development, prompt and context engineering, and business process automation. You run your own client conversations and pilot cycles, and you work within the architecture and standards set by the Architect, pushing back with a reasoned case when warranted.

What you will do

• Work directly with business stakeholders and domain experts to understand objectives, processes, constraints and expected outcomes
• Analyse requirements, documentation, examples, templates and other reference materials
• Identify which workflows are worth automating with AI and which are better served by conventional software, and say so plainly
• Translate complex, ambiguous business processes into structured, executable instructions for AI agents
• Design, implement, test and maintain reusable AI skills: instructions, supporting scripts, validation logic, reference data and shared workflow components
• Build evaluation for your workstream: realistic scenarios, golden cases, acceptance criteria and regression checks
• Debug agent behaviour: establish why a workflow produced the wrong result and fix the root cause
• Run pilots with real users, collect structured feedback and ship improved versions
• Own the outcomes of your workstream: adoption, measurable time saved, and reliability for real users
• Follow the team's standards for authoring, reviewing, versioning and releasing skills, and contribute to improving them
• Integrate with the client's platforms and data sources

What we expect

• Proven hands-on software engineering experience: you build, review, test and maintain production-quality solutions today
• Strong engineering foundation in at least one modern stack. Our delivery stack is TypeScript / Node.js (NestJS, Angular); fluency is an advantage, not a requirement. Backgrounds in Python, Java or .NET are very welcome
• Solid engineering practice: version control, code review, automated testing, CI/CD
• Real LLM-backed systems shipped to real users, not just prototypes
• Hands-on experience with modern AI tools and platforms and a working map of the current landscape, not tied to a single vendor
• Working command of agentic patterns: tool use / function calling, MCP, prompt engineering, context engineering, structured instruction design, orchestration
• Experience evaluating and improving non-deterministic systems with test sets and measurable acceptance criteria
• Sound judgement on where AI fits and where conventional software is the better answer
• Direct experience with external clients and business stakeholders: you run your own client conversations without an intermediary
• Experience shaping and pitching solutions, not only delivering pre-scoped work
• Ability to turn ambiguous requirements and tacit domain knowledge into a clear design and an executable workflow, and to ask the questions that close the gap
• Ability to explain technical approaches and trade-offs to a non-technical audience
• Product mindset: you optimise for user adoption and business outcome, not technical elegance
• English C1: you run client conversations unaided
• Sustained working-hours overlap with the client (US / Western Europe)

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with Claude Code, especially authoring Skills, plugins or MCP servers
• Experience with LLM evaluation tooling (promptfoo, LangSmith, custom harnesses)
• Consulting or professional services background
• Exposure to HR tech, compensation & benefits, payroll or workforce analytics
• Experience building internal developer tooling or standing up a platform capability
• Public work: open-source agent tooling, published skills or plugins, conference talks, technical writing on agentic engineering

What we offer

Model: B2B contract with Bonapolia - one contract, one monthly invoice
Rate: negotiated per candidate seniority and client budget
Payment: monthly invoice, paid on the same schedule the client pays us (usually 30 days)
Contract written under your country's law
We handle the client-side paperwork: MSA, NDA, invoicing

About Bonapolia

Bonapolia is a family-owned IT staff augmentation team based in Lisbon. We build engineering teams for product companies and IT consultancies across Europe and the US.
More at bonapolia.com

Ready to Join?

We look forward to receiving your application and welcoming you to our team!