AI Engineer

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AI Engineer

Senior / Lead · London (Hybrid) · £80,000 – £110,000 + Excellent Benefits

The Opportunity

A fast-growing, globally recognised AI consultancy is looking for experienced AI Engineers to join its expanding UK team. The business is trusted by leading enterprises to deliver AI into production at scale, working in close partnership with the world's top AI and cloud providers.

This is a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of software craftsmanship and cutting-edge AI implementation. You won't be training models. You'll be architecting and building the orchestration layer that makes complex LLM systems reliable, scalable, and genuinely useful in production environments.

You'll work on some of the most technically demanding AI challenges in industry: multi-agent systems, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and robust evaluation frameworks, all at enterprise scale.

What You'll Be Doing

• Designing and building production-grade AI systems that integrate LLMs, RAG pipelines, vector databases, and agentic frameworks
• Creating evaluation and observability frameworks to measure, monitor, and continuously improve system performance, accuracy, and reliability
• Implementing and maintaining retrieval systems, including ingestion pipelines, chunking strategies, and advanced techniques such as HyDE
• Building and owning production AI applications: clean code, robust error handling, well-designed APIs, and data pipelines
• Crafting effective prompts and optimising across latency, cost, and quality dimensions for different model providers
• Working with clients and internal teams to translate complex requirements into reliable, trusted AI products

What We're Looking For

Core Requirements

• Hands-on experience building applications with LLM APIs, with a genuine understanding of their capabilities, limitations, and failure modes
• Practical experience implementing RAG architectures, vector databases, knowledge graphs, and prompt engineering techniques
• Experience building multi-step LLM workflows and agentic systems, whether via frameworks (e.g. LangGraph, Strands, Agent SDKs) or custom implementations
• Strong Python proficiency with production API/service development experience and cloud platform knowledge (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Solid grounding in distributed systems, CI/CD, testing frameworks, and deployment pipelines
• Strong data manipulation skills (pandas, SQL) and familiarity with evaluation strategies for LLM-based systems
• Comfortable working with ambiguity, able to optimise non-deterministic systems through experimentation while balancing latency, cost, and quality trade-offs

Nice to Have

• Experience with AI-assisted development tooling (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot)
• Knowledge of when fine-tuning is preferable to prompt engineering or RAG, with hands-on fine-tuning experience
• Familiarity with real-time streaming, multimodal models, or search technologies such as Elasticsearch
• Experience with model observability tools such as LangSmith or Weights & Biases
• Background in a regulated or specialised vertical (financial services, healthcare, energy, legal, retail), with an understanding of compliance, security, and responsible AI considerations
• Experience setting up tool-calling agents, handoffs, and guardrails

For Principal-Level Candidates

Exceptional candidates with a track record of leading end-to-end client engagements, particularly in a consulting context, will also be considered at Principal level. This would suit someone who has owned delivery from initial scoping through to production, and is comfortable leading technical direction alongside client relationships.

What's on Offer

• Salary of £80,000 – £110,000 depending on level and experience
• Company bonus scheme
• Personal learning and development budget
• Choice of equipment, Mac or PC, plus accessories
• A genuinely collaborative culture where your technical perspective will carry weight from day one
• Backing and investment to pursue new ideas and grow your career quickly
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI work across multiple sectors and enterprise clients

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