Lead AI Engineer

Your new company

You'll be joining a well-established digital consultancy with a strong track record of delivering innovative technology solutions. They're growing their AI capability and need an experienced Lead AI Engineer for a large-scale, high-impact AI programme.

Your new role

As Lead AI Engineer, you'll be the hands-on technical lead for the programme. You'll take the architectural direction and turn it into production-grade AI systems that work with complex legacy and multi-cloud environments handling sensitive, high-volume data. You'll work in a mixed team with client-side colleagues, write code yourself and mentor other engineers. Your responsibilities will include:

Designing, building and shipping production AI components such as RAG pipelines, semantic search, embedding infrastructure, orchestration logic and integration layers

Leading engineering within your squad by setting coding standards, reviewing designs and pull requests, and solving complex technical problems

Building Responsible AI guardrails into live systems, including evaluation harnesses, bias checks and human-in-the-loop review points

Making sure AI services are secure by default and observable in production, with solid logging, monitoring, alerting and rollback

Pairing with internal engineers and upskilling them so the knowledge stays in-house

Choosing efficient, right-sized models and infrastructure that support sustainability commitments

What you'll need to succeed

You'll be an experienced, hands-on AI engineer who is comfortable leading technically while staying close to the code. You'll need:

Expert-level coding skills, typically in Python, applied to AI/ML systems in production

Strong hands-on experience with semantic search, vector databases or embeddings, and building RAG pipelines

Experience with LLM orchestration and agentic frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex or multi-agent patterns)

Prompt engineering skills, plus experience with systematic evaluation and guardrail tooling, such as hallucination detection and safety testing

LLMOps/MLOps experience, including model versioning, deployment, monitoring and rollback

Cloud-native engineering on AWS, Azure or GCP, including their AI/ML services

Experience with CI/CD, containerisation and infrastructure-as-code for AI workloads

Data engineering skills to build reliable pipelines from unstructured and legacy sources

An understanding of secure-by-design engineering for sensitive data

Experience working in agile, multidisciplinary teams

Desirable:

Cloud certifications at associate or professional level

Previous delivery of AI or digital services in UK central government or the wider public sector

Experience fine-tuning or adapting open-source or foundation models

Exposure to wider AI and automation technologies such as NLP, computer vision, RPA and predictive AI

What you'll get in return

A lead role on a high-profile, large-scale AI programme with real public impact

The chance to shape how AI is built and adopted across a major organisation

Hybrid working (one day a week on-site)

A collaborative, inclusive culture that values diversity and flexible working

What you need to do now

If you're interested in this role, click 'apply now' to forward an up-to-date copy of your CV, or call us now.

If this job isn't quite right for you, but you are looking for a new position, please contact us for a confidential discussion about your career.

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