Lead AI Engineer

Department: Tech

Location: London

Employment Type: FullTime

Swap is the infrastructure behind modern agentic commerce. The only AI-native platform connecting backend operations with a forward-thinking storefront experience.

Built for brands that want to sell anything - anywhere, Swap centralizes global operations, powers intelligent workflows, and unlocks margin-protecting decisions with real-time data and capability. Our products span cross-border, tax, returns, demand planning, and our next-generation agentic storefront, giving merchants full transparency and the ability to act with confidence.

At Swap, we’re building a culture that values clarity, creativity, and shared ownership as we redefine how global commerce works.

About the Role

We are seeking a Lead AI Engineer generalist to build robust, scalable conversational and autonomous AI agents in e-commerce. You will own large parts of the architecture and technical direction of our agent platform, building production-ready systems that handle high-volume agent workloads using modern JavaScript & Python frameworks. This is a lead-level role responsible for setting engineering standards, shaping platform architecture, and mentoring other engineers while working closely with product and design to bring intelligent agent experiences to life.

Key Responsibilities

• Own Agent Platform Architecture: Design and evolve distributed systems for multi-agent orchestration using JavaScript AI frameworks (Node, NestJS), serverless compute platforms, and advanced state management. Define best practices for reliability, scalability, and extensibility.

• Build Agent Infrastructure: Develop production-grade agent runtimes, orchestration layers, workflow engines, and tool integrations. Ensure systems support high concurrency, real-time interaction, and seamless backend integration.

• Agent Observability & Quality: Implement comprehensive tracing, monitoring, and structured logging for real-time performance tracking and conversation quality evaluation. Build interactive dashboards and reporting interfaces for stakeholders.

• Agent Communication & Workflows: Implement multi agent harnesses, cloud endpoints, and real-time communication systems.

• Performance & Platform Reliability: Implement advanced caching strategies, high-availability patterns (99.9%+ uptime), CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code. Lead improvements in system performance, cost efficiency, and developer experience.

• Technical Leadership: Set engineering standards for the agent platform. Conduct architectural reviews, mentor engineers, contribute to hiring, and partner cross-functionally to align technical decisions with product vision.

What We’d Like to See

• Experience: 6+ years in software engineering, with 1+ years in AI/ML platform engineering focused on designing and scaling production agent systems or high-traffic conversational AI platforms.

• AI Frameworks: Expert experience with JavaScript-based AI agent frameworks. Deep understanding of agent orchestration, state management, tool usage patterns, memory systems, and conversational AI design.

• Full Stack JavaScript/TypeScript: Advanced Node.js/TypeScript with distributed systems, asynchronous programming, event-driven architecture, and multi-agent protocols. Strong experience building modern frontend applications for real-time web interfaces.

• Observability & Reliability: Production experience with observability frameworks, structured logging, APM solutions, and evaluation pipelines. Experience building internal analytics dashboards and developer tooling.

• Cloud & Infrastructure: Advanced experience with cloud AI services, vector databases, serverless computing, infrastructure automation, and modern deployment patterns for JavaScript applications.

• Leadership: Demonstrated experience leading technical initiatives, driving architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and influencing cross-functional teams.

Benefits:

• Competitive base salary

• Stock options in a high-growth startup

• Competitive PTO with public holidays additional

• Private Health

• Pension

• Wellness benefits

• Breakfast Mondays

Diversity & Equal Opportunities:

We embrace diversity and equality in a serious way. We are committed to building a team with a variety of backgrounds, skills, and views. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. Creating a culture of equality isn't just the right thing to do; it's also the smart thing.