Senior Applied AI Engineer

Xapien

About Us Every business needs to know who they’re really working with whether it’s suppliers, investors, partners, or third parties. At Xapien, we’re reinventing how organisations do that, combining speed, scale and accuracy with cutting-edge AI. Since 2018, we’ve grown from a deep-tech startup to a global player in AI-driven due diligence and risk intelligence. 2024 was a landmark year as we closed a $10M Series A, earned recognition in the Chartis RiskTech100® and Everest Group’s Leading 50™, and expanded our products, markets and customer base. 2025 was even bigger: With new regulations, rising compliance pressure and growing reputation risks, organisations everywhere are demanding smarter, faster ways to work and they’re turning to us. Customers worldwide from global law firms and private banks to universities and nonprofits rely on Xapien to turn days of manual research into trusted insights, delivered in minutes. Our momentum so far Customers in a diverse range of industries, with particular growth in wealth management, financial services and supply chain onboarding. Demand accelerating beyond our UK headquarters, across multiple continents with new customers in the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania. Why this is an exciting time to join This isn’t just another job role; it’s an opportunity to shape the future of the due diligence industry with a market-leading product trusted by global organisations. Whether you’re in marketing, communications, sales, or finance, you’ll play a critical role in driving growth, building credibility, and defining how we connect our product to a rapidly evolving market. We’re scaling fast with more customers, more releases, and bigger regulatory and market challenges. Expectations are rising, due diligence now means real-time insight, delivered efficiently and with impact. You won’t just be executing campaigns, closing deals, or managing numbers, you’ll be influencing strategy, optimising processes, and helping position a brand that’s setting the new standard for trust and transparency. For people who love learning, innovating, and making an impact that matters now is the moment to be a part of Xapien. The challenge Xapien is growing fast – from around 75 people today towards 100 in the coming year, including our first expansion into the US. Until now we’ve hired and led teams in a highly founder-led, manager-driven way, and that has served us well. At this scale, though, the risk is growing inconsistency in how we hire, manage, develop, and reward people – and we can already see early signals in engagement and retention, particularly in the 6–12 month window. The challenge in this role is to put the systems and frameworks in place that let us scale that quality, consistency, and fairness as we grow – without adding unnecessary bureaucracy. The role As Xapien scales, our ability to hire, develop, reward, and retain high-performing people depends on having strong systems behind our managers — not on any one person owning people decisions for them. The People & Talent Lead exists to design and implement those core systems. This is a builder's role: you'll create the practical frameworks, tools, and processes that give managers the structure and confidence to lead their teams well. You will not own people decisions on behalf of managers or leadership; you will make those decisions easier, fairer, and more consistent to make. You’ll report to the leader responsible for People and Finance, with strategic sponsorship from the CEO. You’ll work closely with our Talent Partner, and draw on existing operations and admin support for coordination and delivery. How the role works This role sits within a clear operating model: * The People & Talent Lead designs and implements the systems that managers and leaders use. * Managers remain accountable for leading their teams and for the people decisions within them. * Existing operational support provides administrative and coordination capacity. In short: you build the system, managers run their teams within it, and operations help deliver it. Key Responsibilities Manager enablement * Build practical tools, templates, and guidance that help managers hire, develop, and lead effectively. * Design manager training covering feedback, performance conversations, role clarity, and decision-making. * Support managers as a coach and partner, while ensuring accountability stays with the manager. Talent & hiring systems * Define and implement a structured, high-quality hiring system, including role definition, interview frameworks, scorecards, and assessment criteria. * Establish a clear hiring bar and a consistent approach to evaluating candidates. * Manage and develop the Talent Partner, who continues to run hiring processes end-to-end. * Use hiring data and funnel insights to improve quality, speed, and consistency. Performance & progression * Design lightweight performance and progression frameworks. * Ensure roles have clear expectations, success measures, and progression paths. * Build the process, tools, and guidance needed for consistent performance conversations and decisions. * Support calibration and consistency across teams. Reward, benchmarking & fairness * Support the development of a compensation philosophy and benchmarking approach. * Build guidance for pay reviews, promotions, and reward decisions. * Ensure pay, progression, and performance frameworks are applied fairly and consistently. * Partner closely with Finance on affordability, planning, and trade-offs. Onboarding & early employee experience * Design a consistent onboarding framework that helps new joiners become productive quickly. * Define manager responsibilities across the first 30, 60, and 90 days. * Improve the employee experience through the first 6–12 months, particularly around role clarity, expectations, and development. People communications & adoption * Own the communication and rollout of people frameworks, processes, and initiatives. * Ensure changes are clearly understood and adopted across teams. * Partner with existing operations/admin support on coordination and delivery. System design & implementation * Define how people and talent systems work end-to-end. * Keep frameworks simple, practical, and scalable. * Establish clear ownership for each people process so it is applied consistently across the organisation. * Support Xapien's evolution towards an AI-enabled workforce, including defining the capabilities required and helping leaders adapt team structures. What success looks like * Managers take greater ownership of hiring and performance decisions, with the tools and confidence to do so effectively. * Hiring quality and consistency improve across teams. * Performance, progression, and reward decisions become clearer, fairer, and more consistent. * Employees have stronger role clarity, particularly in the 6–12-month tenure group. * Onboarding becomes more structured and effective. * People systems are simple, adopted, and scalable. * Leadership has better visibility and data to support people decisions. What you’ll bring * Experience building people systems in scaling companies, ideally through comparable periods of fast growth. * Strength across performance, progression, hiring systems, and reward frameworks. * A practical, hands-on approach – comfortable building from scratch rather than inheriting an established function. * Strong judgement and a commercial mindset. * The ability to influence managers and senior leaders through credibility rather than authority. * Comfort with ambiguity, pace, and a deliberately low-process environment. * A systems-minded outlook, balanced with a healthy dislike of bureaucracy. Here’s our promise to you: * We are going to work with you - to build a rewarding and fulfilling career with the opportunities, challenges and resources you need to do you your best work. * We succeed together- you will own a meaningful part of the business through our employee shares & equity programme. * Private health insurance to keep you in tip-top condition. * Life Insurance – let's hope nobody ever needs this! * Unlimited holidays – yes, it really is uncapped – take the time you need, when you need it. * Everyone is learning, developing and challenging themselves so we have a £1k professional development fund per year if you want to learn new skills, even new things outside of work. * Most importantly of all, we will work with you, to help you realise your fullest potential, always.

Xapien

About Us Every business needs to know who they’re really working with whether it’s suppliers, investors, partners, or third parties. At Xapien, we’re reinventing how organisations do that, combining speed, scale and accuracy with cutting-edge AI. Since 2018, we’ve grown from a deep-tech startup to a global player in AI-driven due diligence and risk intelligence. 2024 was a landmark year as we closed a $10M Series A, earned recognition in the Chartis RiskTech100® and Everest Group’s Leading 50™, and expanded our products, markets and customer base. 2025 was even bigger: With new regulations, rising compliance pressure and growing reputation risks, organisations everywhere are demanding smarter, faster ways to work and they’re turning to us. Customers worldwide from global law firms and private banks to universities and nonprofits rely on Xapien to turn days of manual research into trusted insights, delivered in minutes. Our momentum so far Customers in a diverse range of industries, with particular growth in wealth management, financial services and supply chain onboarding. Demand accelerating beyond our UK headquarters, across multiple continents with new customers in the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania. Why this is an exciting time to join This isn’t just another job role; it’s an opportunity to shape the future of the due diligence industry with a market-leading product trusted by global organisations. Whether you’re in marketing, communications, sales, or finance, you’ll play a critical role in driving growth, building credibility, and defining how we connect our product to a rapidly evolving market. We’re scaling fast with more customers, more releases, and bigger regulatory and market challenges. Expectations are rising, due diligence now means real-time insight, delivered efficiently and with impact. You won’t just be executing campaigns, closing deals, or managing numbers, you’ll be influencing strategy, optimising processes, and helping position a brand that’s setting the new standard for trust and transparency. For people who love learning, innovating, and making an impact that matters now is the moment to be a part of Xapien. THE ROLE We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to join our engineering team in a high-impact technical leadership role. You'll work on our most challenging technical problems, own parts of our platform’s architecture, and help shape the technical direction of our backend stack. Our tech stack center’s on Go microservices, with Temporal workflows, MongoDB and ElasticSearch running on Kubernetes in GCP. You'll work with modern patterns including event-driven architectures, gRPC and REST APIs, and comprehensive observability with Grafana Cloud. You'll take technical ownership of major domains within our platform - whether that's our Investigations pipeline (web scraping, data provider integrations, LLM-powered analysis) or our Core App systems (user journeys, features, and configuration). You'll be a technical authority, establishing patterns that others follow and driving initiatives that span multiple teams. WHAT YOU'LL DO * Own the technical direction and architecture for parts of our platform * Design and build complex backend services and systems that scale * Drive technical decisions that affect multiple teams * Establish patterns, standards, and best practices that others will follow * Lead complex technical initiatives from design through implementation * Identify and address systemic technical challenges across our backend * Write exemplary Go code that sets the standard for quality and design * Mentor engineers across the organization, raising the technical bar * Balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery * Influence technology choices and architectural direction * Collaborate with engineering leadership on technical strategy * Build new systems and features while improving our existing architecture WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIAL * 10+ years of professional software engineering experience * Deep expertise in Go, with mastery of concurrency, performance optimization, and advanced patterns * Proven track record of designing and owning large-scale systems * Strong experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or similar complex systems * Deep understanding of databases, particularly MongoDB or similar NoSQL systems * Extensive experience with microservices architecture and inter-service communication * Expert-level understanding of containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) * Experience establishing technical standards and patterns across teams * Strong architectural thinking with ability to balance trade-offs * Track record of mentoring and developing other engineers * Ability to drive technical initiatives with minimal guidance * Experience influencing technical direction at an organizational level * Excellent communication skills with ability to articulate complex technical concepts HIGHLY DESIRABLE * Experience with Temporal or similar workflow orchestration systems at scale * Deep knowledge of event streaming platforms like Kafka * Experience with LLMs and AI integration (particularly for Investigations team) * Background in SaaS platforms or B2B products at scale * Expert-level knowledge of observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, etc.) * Deep understanding of authorization patterns, security, and multi-tenancy * Experience with protobuf and gRPC OUR TECH STACK * Languages: Go * Databases: MongoDB * Messaging & Orchestration: Temporal, Kafka * APIs: REST, gRPC, protobuf * Infrastructure: Kubernetes, GCP * Observability: Grafana stack * AI: LLMs (OpenAI, Gemini), RAG systems WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE In your first 6 months, you will have: * Owned and driven a significant technical initiative to completion * Established new patterns or improved existing ones across teams * Mentored multiple engineers, visibly raising technical standards * Contributed to architectural decisions * Been recognized as a technical authority in your domain * Made measurable improvements to system reliability, performance, or scalability * Influenced the technical direction of our backend platform Here’s our promise to you: * We are going to work with you - to build a rewarding and fulfilling career with the opportunities, challenges and resources you need to do you your best work. * We succeed together- you will own a meaningful part of the business through our employee shares & equity programme. * Private health insurance to keep you in tip-top condition. * Life Insurance – let's hope nobody ever needs this! * Unlimited holidays – yes, it really is uncapped – take the time you need, when you need it. * Everyone is learning, developing and challenging themselves so we have a £1k professional development fund per year if you want to learn new skills, even new things outside of work. * Most importantly of all, we will work with you, to help you realise your fullest potential, always.

Xapien

About Us Every business needs to know who they’re really working with whether it’s suppliers, investors, partners, or third parties. At Xapien, we’re reinventing how organisations do that, combining speed, scale and accuracy with cutting-edge AI. Since 2018, we’ve grown from a deep-tech startup to a global player in AI-driven due diligence and risk intelligence. 2024 was a landmark year as we closed a $10M Series A, earned recognition in the Chartis RiskTech100® and Everest Group’s Leading 50™, and expanded our products, markets and customer base. 2025 was even bigger: With new regulations, rising compliance pressure and growing reputation risks, organisations everywhere are demanding smarter, faster ways to work and they’re turning to us. Customers worldwide from global law firms and private banks to universities and nonprofits rely on Xapien to turn days of manual research into trusted insights, delivered in minutes. Our momentum so far Customers in a diverse range of industries, with particular growth in wealth management, financial services and supply chain onboarding. Demand accelerating beyond our UK headquarters, across multiple continents with new customers in the Middle East, Asia, and Oceania. Why this is an exciting time to join This isn’t just another job role; it’s an opportunity to shape the future of the due diligence industry with a market-leading product trusted by global organisations. Whether you’re in marketing, communications, sales, or finance, you’ll play a critical role in driving growth, building credibility, and defining how we connect our product to a rapidly evolving market. We’re scaling fast with more customers, more releases, and bigger regulatory and market challenges. Expectations are rising, due diligence now means real-time insight, delivered efficiently and with impact. You won’t just be executing campaigns, closing deals, or managing numbers, you’ll be influencing strategy, optimising processes, and helping position a brand that’s setting the new standard for trust and transparency. For people who love learning, innovating, and making an impact that matters now is the moment to be a part of Xapien. THE ROLE We're hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer to own our CI/CD platform and developer experience. You'll be the person who makes shipping software fast, safe, and enjoyable, building the foundations that every engineering team relies on daily. Our infrastructure runs on Kubernetes in GCP, with Go microservices, Temporal workflows, and a modern observability stack built on Grafana Cloud. You'll work across the full delivery pipeline, from how code gets built and tested, to how it gets deployed and monitored in production. We're an AI-native engineering team. We use Claude Code daily and we think seriously about how AI tooling changes the way engineering work gets done. We want a DevOps engineer who brings that same mindset to infrastructure and tooling, automating aggressively, reducing toil relentlessly, and thinking about how the right platform decisions multiply productivity across the whole org. You'll have real ownership here. This isn't a support role; you'll set the direction for how we build, test, and ship software, and you'll work closely with our platform and product engineering teams to make sure the developer experience keeps pace with our ambitions. WHAT YOU'LL DO * Own and evolve our CI/CD pipelines, making them faster, more reliable, and easier to reason about * Define and drive our developer experience strategy — from local development environments to deployment workflows * Build internal tooling and automation that reduces friction and cognitive load for product engineers * Establish standards and best practices around deployment, testing pipelines, and release processes * Partner with the platform team on the boundary between infrastructure and developer tooling * Instrument and improve the observability of our pipelines and delivery process * Champion a culture of fast feedback loops and high deployment confidence * Use AI tooling to accelerate your own work and help shape how the wider team does the same * Identify and address systemic bottlenecks in how we build and ship software * Mentor engineers across the org on DevOps practices and platform tooling WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR ESSENTIAL * 6+ years of professional experience in DevOps, platform engineering, or a related role * Strong hands-on experience with CI/CD platforms — GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or similar * Deep understanding of Kubernetes and container-based deployment workflows * Experience with GCP or equivalent cloud provider at production scale * Solid infrastructure-as-code fundamentals (Terraform or similar) * Strong scripting and automation skills — comfortable in Bash, Python, or Go * A genuine interest in developer experience: you care about how engineers feel when they interact with the systems you build * Experience working with observability stacks — metrics, logs, traces — and using them to improve pipeline reliability * Ability to work autonomously and drive initiatives with minimal guidance * Strong communication skills — able to work across teams and translate infrastructure concerns into language that lands with product engineers HIGHLY DESIRABLE * Experience with Temporal or workflow orchestration systems * Familiarity with Kafka or event streaming infrastructure * Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, and the wider observability ecosystem * Background in platform or internal developer platform (IDP) thinking * Exposure to security and compliance tooling within CI/CD pipelines (SAST, SBOM, secret scanning) * Experience driving DevEx improvements and measuring their impact * Familiarity with AI-assisted development tooling and how it changes platform requirements OUR TECH STACK * Languages: Go, Bash, Python * CI/CD: GitHub Actions, ArgoCD * Infrastructure: Kubernetes, GCP, Terraform * Observability: Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo) * Messaging & Orchestration: Temporal, Kafka * Development Tools: Claude Code, AI-assisted development workflows WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE In your first 6 months, you will have: * Materially improved the speed or reliability of our CI/CD pipelines * Shipped at least one developer experience improvement that engineers talk about positively * Established clear ownership and standards around our deployment process * Built strong working relationships with platform and product engineering teams * Contributed to how we think about and measure developer productivity * Helped evolve our AI-assisted engineering practices within the DevOps domain Here’s our promise to you: * We are going to work with you - to build a rewarding and fulfilling career with the opportunities, challenges and resources you need to do you your best work. * We succeed together- you will own a meaningful part of the business through our employee shares & equity programme. * Private health insurance to keep you in tip-top condition. * Life Insurance – let's hope nobody ever needs this! * Unlimited holidays – yes, it really is uncapped – take the time you need, when you need it. * Everyone is learning, developing and challenging themselves so we have a £1k professional development fund per year if you want to learn new skills, even new things outside of work. * Most importantly of all, we will work with you, to help you realise your fullest potential, always.