Applied AI Engineer

About the role

Santander AI Lab is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to join its Madrid team. You will work on production‑grade AI systems that directly impact the bank’s 170 million customers, collaborating with world‑class research partners.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and deploy production‑grade agentic AI systems with multi‑agent orchestration, memory, planning, tool use and error recovery.
• Develop and fine‑tune small and medium language models for regulated banking use cases, creating custom evaluation frameworks and domain‑specific benchmarks.
• Architect and implement MCP servers, A2A protocols, and federated API layers to enable AI agents across a multi‑country infrastructure.
• Prototype new ideas in two‑week sprints, delivering hypothesis, architecture, code, functional demo and a concise one‑pager.
• Collaborate with researchers, data scientists and business stakeholders to translate technical concepts into tangible bank value.
• Monitor emerging research, evaluate new tools (e.g., Harness Engineering, Kiro, Windsurf, Devin) and integrate them into lab workflows.

Required profile

• Strong background in AI/ML engineering, preferably with experience in financial services.
• Proven ability to deliver production‑ready AI solutions in fast‑paced, research‑driven environments.
• Excellent collaboration skills to work with cross‑functional teams and external partners.

Required skills

• Agentic AI system design and multi‑agent orchestration
• Language model fine‑tuning and evaluation
• MCP server architecture
• A2A protocol implementation
• Federated API development
• Experience with AWS cloud services

What we offer

• Opportunity to work on cutting‑edge AI projects within a global bank.
• Collaboration with leading academic and industry partners.
• Dynamic, innovation‑focused lab environment.