AI Developer

About the Job

We're looking for an AI Developer to join Klopotek's engineering team from our Beirut office. You will work remotely alongside our development team in Gioia del Colle, Italy designing, building and running AI-powered capabilities inside the software that runs the publishing operations of major global publishers. This is a hands-on engineering role, not a research position. You will integrate large language models into production systems: retrieval over our product knowledge, AI assistants for support and operations, agentic workflows that act on real business data, and AI features inside our products. Our core platform is built on Java and Oracle, so you will work close to that stack connecting AI services to existing APIs, data and business logic, and making them reliable, secure and measurable. You will be joining a small but growing Klopotek team in Lebanon four colleagues are already working with us from Beirut, and this role is part of a deliberate expansion of our engineering presence there. You'll have a genuine peer group locally, and work closely with the Italian development team day to day. This is not a role that rewards knowing the right buzzwords. It is a role for someone who is selfdriven, technically grounded and genuinely excited about learning someone who can tell a convincing prototype from a dependable product, and who takes ownership from idea through to production. What You'll Do Design, build and run LLM-powered features and services from first prototype to monitored production Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines over product documentation, configuration knowledge and support history: ingestion, chunking, embeddings, search and ranking Develop agentic workflows and tool integrations (e.g. via the Model Context Protocol) that let AI work safely with our APIs, ticketing systems and business data Integrate AI services with our Java backend services, REST APIs and Oracle databases Build evaluation suites and test sets so we know with numbers whether a change makes an AI feature better or worse Engineer prompts, context and guardrails; handle hallucination, data privacy, access control and cost from the start, not as an afterthought Monitor AI features in production: quality, latency, token cost and failure modes and improve them continuously Work with support, product and operations colleagues to turn real use cases into tools people actually use Collaborate asynchronously and synchronously with the Italian development team and crossfunctional stakeholders Participate in code reviews give and receive honest, constructive feedback Share what you learn: help other developers adopt AI-assisted development and write documentation the next person can actually use Use AI coding tools actively and critically in your own work while taking full ownership of what ships How You Work We're hiring for mindset as much as skills. The right person for this role: Is genuinely curious and self-driven you follow the field because you want to, and you can separate real progress from hype Is sceptical by default you measure before you believe, and you know a good demo is not proof Thinks in systems you consider how models, data, APIs and people interact, where things break, and how to design for resilience, not just the happy path Solves problems even when the path isn't obvious you investigate, experiment, and iterate Thinks about the user you build AI features that fit how people actually work, not features that show off the technology Communicates clearly and proactively in a distributed team you don't wait to be chased, you flag blockers early and keep colleagues informed Challenges ideas constructively and is comfortable being challenged in returnTakes ownership of features end-to-end, not just your assigned ticket Is comfortable with ambiguity and fast-changing tools and requirements Proven experience building and shipping LLM-based applications to real users not only experiments or tutorials Hands-on experience with LLM APIs (e.g. Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI) including tool use / function calling and structured outputs Practical RAG

Experience

embeddings, vector or hybrid search, chunking strategies, and judging retrieval quality Solid software engineering in Python and/or Java clean, tested, maintainable code; comfortable working in an existing Java backend API and integration

Skills

• REST, JSON, authentication, and connecting services to existing business systems Relational database fluency strong SQL; Oracle experience preferred, PostgreSQL or MySQLaccepted A habit of evaluating AI output systematically test sets, metrics, regression checks rather than by impression Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently and collaboratively Experience with Agile methodologies and fast-paced delivery cycles Professional-level English, written and verbal your primary working language with the Italian team Nice to Have Agent frameworks and protocols (Model Context Protocol, LangChain/LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Spring AI or similar) Experience with vector databases or search engines (pgvector, Oracle AI Vector Search, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Azure AI Search) LLM observability and evaluation tooling (e.g. Langfuse, LangSmith, promptfoo or your own) Java with Spring Boot or JAX-RS, JPA/Hibernate Containerisation and deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions or equivalent) Cloud experience, especially Azure (also AWS) Security for AI systems: prompt injection, data leakage, access control, GDPR Familiarity with Keycloak, OpenID Connect, OAuth 2 or JWT Frontend basics (TypeScript, Angular) to build simple user interfaces for AI features Domain experience in publishing, rights & royalties, or enterprise support and service management You don't need to tick every box
• We value the ability to learn quickly and adapt over an exact match on the tech stack
• What We Value Learning over knowing Evidence over hype Adaptability over rigidity Problem-solving over box-ticking Ownership over task execution Honest, direct collaboration over hierarchy provement, and an honest feedback culture

Desired Candidate Profile

Proven experience building and shipping LLM-based applications to real users not only experiments or tutorials Hands-on experience with LLM APIs (e.g. Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI) including tool use / function calling and structured outputs Practical RAG

Experience

Skills

• REST, JSON, authentication, and connecting services to existing business systems Relational database fluency strong SQL; Oracle experience preferred, PostgreSQL or MySQLaccepted A habit of evaluating AI output systematically test sets, metrics, regression checks rather than by impression Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently and collaboratively Experience with Agile methodologies and fast-paced delivery cycles Professional-level English, written and verbal your primary working language with the Italian team Nice to Have Agent frameworks and protocols (Model Context Protocol, LangChain/LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Spring AI or similar) Experience with vector databases or search engines (pgvector, Oracle AI Vector Search, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Azure AI Search) LLM observability and evaluation tooling (e.g. Langfuse, LangSmith, promptfoo or your own) Java with Spring Boot or JAX-RS, JPA/Hibernate Containerisation and deployment (Docker, Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions or equivalent) Cloud experience, especially Azure (also AWS) Security for AI systems: prompt injection, data leakage, access control, GDPR Familiarity with Keycloak, OpenID Connect, OAuth 2 or JWT Frontend basics (TypeScript, Angular) to build simple user interfaces for AI features Domain experience in publishing, rights & royalties, or enterprise support and service management You don't need to tick every box
• We value the ability to learn quickly and adapt over an exact match on the tech stack