Staff Software Engineer, AIUp to £200,000
About the Role
Fonoa runs a global tax automation platform that delivers real-time sales tax, VAT, GST, and e-invoicing decisions to enterprise customers. The team is early in its AI journey — there's no entrenched AI org to slot into and no pre-baked playbook. You'll shape how LLMs and agentic systems get applied across the product, partnering with engineering, product, and design to prototype intelligent workflows, build natural language interfaces, and design agent-driven experiences that simplify genuinely complex tax problems.
This isn't a research-disconnected-from-production role. You'll design the backend services powering AI workflows, optimise prompts, build the evaluation pipelines that keep models honest, and develop the agent platform — both internal and customer-facing. Fonoa names LLMs and AI Agents directly in its published engineering values, so the AI mandate is real rather than a side project. Tax automation is a high-leverage AI domain: regulatory complexity, multi-jurisdiction edge cases, and a deep structured compliance corpus to reason over.
What They're Looking For
- You have 5+ years building customer-facing products at a high-quality software company, with end-to-end ownership of complex features
- You bring deep, hands-on understanding of LLMs, prompt engineering, agent frameworks, and AI safety/security practices — production scar tissue, not lab time
- You've built RAG architectures in production and designed the evaluation pipelines that keep them honest
- You combine strong product instincts with technical depth — you can argue for a model choice in commercial terms as well as accuracy terms
- You're comfortable operating in ambiguity, experimenting quickly, and shipping iteratively in a domain that's still being defined
About Fonoa
Fonoa runs the global tax automation platform that powers sales tax, VAT, GST, and e-invoicing compliance for some of the largest digital businesses. Series B, $85M raised from Index Ventures, Coatue, Dawn Capital, and OMERS Ventures, reportedly crossing $100M ARR. Founded 2018, HQ in Dublin with ~220 people including ~63 in engineering. The team brings backgrounds from Cabify, GitLab, Amazon, Uber, SAP, Spotify, and Bloomberg.
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