Principal Engineer, AI Platform

CTM is building the intelligence infrastructure that will underpin AI-powered capabilities across its global travel platform. We are looking for a Principal Engineer, AI Platform to lead that effort.

This is a senior technical leadership role with real organisational scope. You will lead the CTM Intelligence Pillar, spanning an AI/ML platform team and an experimental conversational AI team, and own the technical direction of CTM's shared AI/ML platform: the governed, self-service infrastructure that other engineering teams build on top of.

The team you are joining has strong technical foundations, and the work already in flight reflects genuine engineering rigour. The priority now is accelerating delivery and getting the broader organisation building on top of what exists.

Equally important is the organisational dimension. CTM is moving toward a model where every engineering team can ship intelligent features through governed, self-service platform capabilities. You will shape how that happens, leading the internal AI Guild and working across the engineering organisation to establish what the platform provides and how teams consume it.

Standard

Platform Leadership

Own the technical direction of CTM's shared AI/ML platform, including architecture, governance, and the standards that other engineering teams build against

Make and communicate clear decisions about what the platform provides, what it does not, and why

Ensure the platform remains genuinely self-service: reducing cognitive load for consuming teams rather than creating dependency on this one

Team and Pillar Leadership

Lead the engineering function across the CTM Intelligence Pillar, managing domain tech leads and supporting their growth

Hire well into gaps in the pillar, maintaining the technical bar the team has already set

Create the conditions for the team to do its best work, including protecting it from scope that belongs elsewhere

Organisational Influence

Co-lead the internal AI Guild, building AI/ML capability and consistent practice across CTM's engineering organisation

Be the credible technical voice for AI strategy with senior and executive stakeholders

Drive the shift toward a self-service model, working across engineering leadership to change how teams think about and consume AI capability

Hands-on Contribution

Contribute directly to architecture and engineering where it adds the most value, particularly during the current phase of platform build-out

The current stack is NestJS, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Prisma, RabbitMQ and Azure AI Foundry

Embrace CTM's core values of Connect, Deliver, Evolve
• Professional, collaborative, and supportive interaction with employees, clients, suppliers, and vendors.
• Ability to work independently as well as part of a team.
• Appropriate and professional written and verbal communication.
• Demonstrated ability to meet deadlines, handle and prioritize simultaneous requests.
• Creative and analytical thinking with strong problem-solving and consultative skills.
• Demonstrates calm under pressure - is a proactive contributor and eager to learn.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite.
• Ability to do basic math.
• Ability to read and interpret information.
• Attention to detail.
• Regular and reliable attendance.

• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in senior or principal roles
• Demonstrated experience managing and mentoring domain or team-level tech leads in a scaled engineering organisation
• Experience working within or alongside internal developer platform models, with a clear understanding of self-service principles and how to apply them to AI/ML capability
• Strong architectural judgment across distributed systems, APIs, and data infrastructure
• Experience building scalable retrieval systems (Vector DBs) across fragmented legacy data.
• Demonstrable experience with: TypeScript, NestJS, PostgreSQL, Prisma, RabbitMQ, direct integration of LLM provider APIs (Azure AI Foundry, OpenAI, or equivalent) in production systems, and strong knowledge of vector stores/RAG and graph databases such as Neo4j
• Experience driving organisational change where the goal was shifting how teams think and work, not just delivering a project

• Hands-on experience with multi-agent frameworks to move beyond simple chatbots toward autonomous business process automation.
• Implementing real-time safety, PII redaction, and hallucination checks.
• Comfortable operating in an environment where not everything is defined yet and some of the hardest problems are political as much as technical
• A track record of applying AI/ML in production systems, with the judgment to know where it belongs and where it does not
• Proven ability to communicate technical strategy to non-technical stakeholders including at executive level, without losing precision implementing automated CI/CD for model testing, versioning, and deployment.