Senior Software Engineer, AI Lab

Permira is a global investment firm that backs successful businesses with growth ambitions. Founded in 1985, the firm advises funds across two core asset classes, private equity and credit, with total committed capital of approximately €80bn. The Permira private equity funds make both long-term majority (Buyout) and minority (Growth Equity) investments in four key sectors: Technology, Consumer, Healthcare, Services. The Permira credit funds support businesses with flexible financing solutions across Direct Lending, Strategic Opportunities and CLO Management. Established in 2007, the firm advises investment funds and products which have provided approximately €20 billion of debt capital to over 300 businesses.

Role Overview

We are seeking an individual to join our AI Lab which sits within our Tech Value Creation Team. This team will be a central entity that develops and deploys applied AI and machine learning capabilities across Permira, collaborating with our teams and sectors. At Permira, AI is not just another IT initiative—it's a fundamental shift in how we work, think, and operate. We are committed to embedding AI deeply into the fabric of our products and workflows—not merely as an add-on, but as a reimaging of what our offerings can be in an AI-native world.

Our strategy focuses on identifying a few high-impact, needle-moving use cases where AI can drive measurable value. We strongly believe AI is a cultural shift and now a baseline competency across every business function. Our goal with the AI Lab is encourage our teams and portfolio companies to be truly AI-native and drive tangible impact with faster innovation velocity, streamlined revenue efficiency, and deliberate cost savings.

This is a hands-on engineering role: you will spend most of your time designing, building, and deploying web applications, APIs, MCPs, and backend services that integrate with our AI capabilities. The role is based in Permira's Milan office and part of a geographically distributed team (UK/US/Europe) that embraces remote and hybrid collaboration.

Key Responsibilities

As a Software Engineer in our AI Lab, you will:

• Collaborate with other members of the AI Lab, Value Creation Team, and IT to design and implement cutting edge applied AI applications.
• Build and maintain scalable, reliable microservice-based backends, APIs and MCPs.
• Develop front-end interfaces that deliver exceptional user experiences.
• Integrate AI and data-driven features into production systems in partnership with data scientists and ML engineers.
• Implement and advocate for best practices in software development, CI/CD, DevOps, and cloud infrastructure.
• Ensure solutions meet security, compliance, and performance standards.
• Write clear documentation and contribute to technical design.
• Work collaboratively in an agile, fast-moving environment to deliver high-impact solutions.

What we're looking for

We are looking for a versatile, high-performing software engineer who combines strong technical skills with business acumen and curiosity. Ideal candidates will have:

• 2–5 years of experience building and deploying production-grade systems
• Strong experience with at least one modern backend framework (e.g., , FastAPI, Flask, Spring Boot, Django, or similar).
• Proficiency in at least one front-end framework such as React, Vue, Angular, or React Native.
• Experience designing and implementing RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs.
• Strong understanding of data modeling and schema design, with hands-on experience across databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch or similar.
• Familiarity with microservices architecture, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, etc.).
• Experience with application monitoring, logging, and alerting tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana), with a focus on observability and performance insights.
• Understanding of software architecture, scalability, and performance optimization.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to partner with non-technical stakeholders.
• A strong cultural fit with Permira—team-first, intellectually curious, low-ego, and entrepreneurial.

Nice to have

• Experience integrating Gen AI / LLM-based features into applications.
• Experience deploying or working with MCP servers.
• Experience working with vector stores and/or graph databases like Pinecone, Neo4J, Qdrant or similar.
• Experience designing or working with role-based access control (RBAC) systems, authentication and authorization frameworks (e.g., OAuth, OpenID Connect, SSO), and related identity management solutions.
• Experience with event-driven systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, etc.).

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