AI Software Engineer (Elixir + LLM)

3 billion people across the world work in frontline jobs. Yet, despite rising costs and staff shortages, frontline organisations are still left to choose between paper, Excel, and WhatsApp, or decade-old workforce management solutions to take care of the most important part of their businesses - their people.

Enter Sona: the next generation of AI-native, frontline workforce management. We've built an end-to-end platform covering Scheduling, HR, Payroll, and Communications that gives the largest frontline organisations everything they need to staff more intelligently and empower their teams.

In under 4 years, we've already made a deep impact on the lives of over 100k frontline workers and the operation of their organisations, grown the team to 110+, and secured over $50M in funding from notable VC's, including Felicis, Northzone, Gradient Ventures (Google), SpeedInvest, Antler, and Notion Capital, plus notable angels like Tom Blomfield (Monzo).

It's a hugely exciting time to be joining the team as we're still small enough that you'll have a significant impact on the company's growth trajectory and culture, yet large enough to have a great structure, experienced leaders and world-class benefits in place. More on working at Sona here .

About the Role

This role is our first engineering role dedicated exclusively to building agentic AI features for Sona. You will be immersed in real-world customer problems and work directly with our CEO, CTO, and Director of AI to rapidly develop and implement cutting-edge LLM-powered prototypes.

Our stack is built primarily around Elixir, with a Phoenix LiveView web frontend (PETAL stack) and a GraphQL API for communicating with our React Native mobile app. You'll join a small pod of software and ML engineers whose mission is to ensure our product is differentiated from our competitors and stays ahead in the race to bring all of the advantages of AI to frontline workforce management. Our Product team principles give more of a flavour of how we like to work day-to-day.

If you're passionate about the speed at which Elixir and LLMs can turn ideas into reality, thrive on quickly finding a way to solve a customer's problems and demonstrate the value of your solution, and are eager to push the boundaries of what's possible with AI, this role is for you.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate closely with our CEO, Product, Commercial, and Customer teams to identify AI-driven solutions and product opportunities.
• Rapidly prototype LLM-based solutions that address real-world challenges in workforce management.
• Showcase the potential of your prototypes to both internal and external stakeholders.
• Iterate on your prototypes based on feedback, and develop them into market-ready products.

Requirements

We don't have strict requirements, but hopefully lots of the following apply to you:

• You have strong professional experience in both Elixir and working with the latest LLMs.
• You have a focus on "getting it shipped" and doing so quickly. When given the choice between "complicated and shiny" vs "get something simple but powerful in front of a user", you always choose the latter.
• You're bullish on what the next 12 months holds for building AI agents and how much change is going to be driven by AI in 2025.
• You're comfortable working directly with c-level internal and stakeholders and excel at translating between real world problems and technical solutions for a non-technical audience.
• You can point at multiple examples - whether you published them or not - of things you've hacked together in Elixir which use LLM's and you've got a list 10 times that long of things you'd like to do if only you had the time.
• You're excited about spending substantial amounts of time every month brainstorming and iterating in our London office, working remotely the rest of the time.

Benefits

• Salary: £90-120k
• Flexible hybrid working from our London office.
• Share options.
• 35 days annual leave (25 days standard plus 10 flexible public holiday days).
• Extra day of leave for every year of service.
• Pension contributions matched up to 5%.
• Comprehensive health insurance.
• Enhanced parental leave & pay.
• Co-working space stipend for those based outside London.
• Bi-annual all expenses paid team retreats.
• The latest Macbook and equipment budget for your home office.
• Professional development budget.
• Unlimited free books.

Note: this represents a typical benefits package for a UK-based, full-time employee. Exact details may vary based on location and employment type but we try to be as fair as possible to all of our team members. Please ask your contact in the Talent team to clarify the available benefits for you.