AI Enablement Engineer

Phorest

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

AI is fundamentally changing how software companies operate. At Phorest, we’re investing in AI not just as a product capability, but as a core part of how we work. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer — AI Enablement to become a founding member of our AI Enablement team. This is a highly autonomous hands-on Staff engineering role. You’ll work across Phorest to identify the highest-leverage opportunities, understand how work really happens, and use AI, automation or software to create measurable business impact. You’ll combine deep technical expertise with strong product judgement, alongside strong commercial and strategic thinking — taking ambiguous problems from discovery through experimentation and into reliable production systems. The goal isn’t to put AI everywhere. It’s to find where technology can create the greatest leverage, choose the right approach, prove the value it creates, and build the foundations that allow that impact to scale.

Requirements

Preferably 10+ years experience designing, building and operating complex production software, with the technical breadth and judgement expected of a Staff Engineer.
Strong practical experience with modern AI, ideally including AI-powered products, internal AI tooling or production LLM applications.
Experience leading complex, high-impact technical initiatives across team or functional boundaries.
Strong architecture and software engineering fundamentals across APIs, integrations, cloud infrastructure, security, scalability, observability and reliability.
Strong product and commercial instincts — able to take an ambiguous problem through discovery, experimentation, user feedback and production delivery.
Strong strategic judgement — connecting technical decisions to business outcomes and balancing short-term experimentation with sustainable long-term solutions.
The ability to operate autonomously, influence without authority and drive critical work through to measurable outcomes.
Excellent communication, listening and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Strong judgement around the evolving AI landscape, build vs buy, governance, security, quality and cost.
A track record of raising the effectiveness of others through technical leadership, mentoring and knowledge sharing.
You have a strong growth mindset, actively seeking and providing high-quality actionable feedback, and role model Phorest’s values as a culture ambassador.
Most importantly, you’ll be deeply curious about AI, constantly exploring what’s becoming possible, and motivated by turning those possibilities into meaningful improvements in how an organisation operates.

Nice To Haves

Experience building tools that help other teams use AI effectively, agentic systems, AI evaluation and orchestration, or establishing AI governance and managing AI tooling and model spend.

Responsibilities

Set the technical direction for AI Enablement : identify and lead solutions to complex, high-leverage problems across the business and establish the engineering patterns and standards that others can build on.
Find and deliver the biggest opportunities: work directly with functions to understand their goals and workflows, prioritise where AI Enablement can create the most value, and drive work from problem through to outcome.
Build the right solution: rapidly prototype and deliver AI-powered tools, agents, automations or conventional software, making pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions based on value, capability, cost, security and maintainability.
Build production systems teams can depend on: ensure critical solutions are scalable, secure, observable, reliable, maintainable and appropriately owned.
Measuring impact : Establish a baseline before each engagement and measure the outcomes afterwards, including engineering, tooling and model costs versus the value created. You will use this evidence to influence future investment, prioritisation and decision-making.
Build for scale: create reusable capabilities, governance and ways of working that make future engagements faster and safer, while helping to shape and manage AI tooling, security, production use and spend across Phorest.
Act as a multiplier: share knowledge, mentor others and help raise AI and engineering capability across the organisation. Provide high-quality actionable feedback, establishing best practices that enable others to make good AI and technical decisions independently. Every engagement should ultimately answer: What changed? What did it cost? What value did it create?