Applied AI Engineer

About CRU:
CRU International is a leading provider of business intelligence and consulting services in the metals, mining, and fertilizer industries. With over 50 years of experience, we offer valuable insights and analysis that help our clients make informed decisions in an ever-changing global market.

About the role: 
Help create valuable customer products by connecting CRU’s structured and unstructured data. You’ll build practical, reliable data-driven capabilities that make CRU intelligence easier to discover, interpret and use—combining data engineering and product development with applied AI technologies where they best serve customer needs.

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities:

• Design and build data pipelines, interfaces and services to reliably combine data and content from multiple sources.
• Develop data products, prototypes and features that connect CRU data sets, research, forecasts and sustainability information.
• Build practical applied AI capabilities, such as semantic search, document processing, information extraction and natural-language interfaces.
• Ensure product outputs are traceable, reliable and appropriately governed, with clear links to source data and content.
• Work with Software Engineering, Product Development, Data Engineering and Data Governance teams to deliver scalable, secure and maintainable solutions.
• Evaluate data engineering, applied AI and product-delivery tools against customer and business needs.

Requirements

Qualifications:

• At least two years of experience in applied AI, data engineering or software engineering.
• Understanding of data modelling, data quality, metadata, lineage and governance principles.
• Experience with cloud-based data and application services; Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and/or Snowflake experience is ideal.
• Fluent written and spoken English.

Skills & Experience:

• A customer- and product-oriented approach, with curiosity and the ability to test ideas and turn successful prototypes into reliable products.
• Organised, adaptable and delivery-focused, with a commitment to quality, reliability and continuous improvement.
• Ability to quickly understand business concepts, data relationships and customer use cases.
• Desirable: experience with search, vector databases, knowledge graphs, semantic layers or retrieval systems.
• Desirable: experience with large language model application frameworks or managed model services, document processing, content management systems, or information-rich businesses.

Technical Skills:

• Strong hands-on experience with Python, SQL and common data-processing libraries.
• Experience with relational databases and data warehouses.
• Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs.
• Familiarity with data transformation, orchestration and pipeline tools.
• Experience with Git, code review, testing and software-development best practices.
• Ability to work with structured formats, including CSV, JSON, Parquet and SQL tables, and unstructured content such as reports and documents.
• Desirable: familiarity with tools such as Pandas, NumPy, FastAPI, Streamlit, Plotly, Scikit-learn, Airflow, Snowflake, Azure OpenAI Service, Amazon Bedrock or LangChain—or equivalent technologies.
• Desirable: familiarity with data catalogues, metadata platforms, observability tools or data-quality frameworks.

Benefits

What We Offer:

• Competitive salary and flexible benefits package. 
• Opportunities for professional growth and development as part of a global company. 
• A collaborative and supportive work environment.
• The chance to work with industry-leading experts and over a diverse range of topics and projects.