Lead AI Engineer

Location: Hybrid - London (Flexible)
Salary: from £80,000 + bonus + benefits
Contract: Permanent, Full-time

We're partnering with a growing technology-focused business investing heavily in AI, automation, and next-generation digital platforms.

The company is building AI-enabled tools and intelligent internal systems designed to improve operations, workflows, and decision-making across the organisation. With a strong engineering culture and a product-led environment, they are focused on delivering practical AI solutions that create measurable business impact.

This is an opportunity to join during a key growth phase and play a leading role in shaping how AI is adopted and deployed across the business.

We're looking for an experienced Lead AI Engineer to join a growing engineering team and help design, build, and deploy scalable AI-powered applications and services.

This is a highly hands-on role focused on turning ideas into production-ready solutions. You'll work across backend engineering, AI integration, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and automation while collaborating closely with product and technical stakeholders.

You'll also help evaluate emerging AI technologies and contribute to best practices across AI engineering and platform development.

• Design and build AI-enabled applications, tools, and workflows
• Integrate LLMs and AI services into production systems
• Develop APIs, backend services, automations, and data pipelines
• Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions
• Prototype and iterate quickly on AI-driven features and use cases
• Write clean, maintainable, production-quality code
• Improve reliability, scalability, monitoring, and performance of AI systems
• Support deployment and operationalisation of AI applications
• Mentor engineers and contribute to technical best practices
• Work closely with product, engineering, and business stakeholders

• Strong software engineering background with backend development expertise
• Strong Python experience and cloud-native development
• Experience integrating AI / LLM technologies into real-world applications
• Experience building scalable production systems
• Understanding of APIs, distributed systems, microservices, and system design
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP
• Familiarity with DevOps / MLOps tooling including Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, monitoring, and logging
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced, product-led environments

• Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, or AI agents
• Exposure to machine learning workflows and applied AI systems
• Experience building internal AI platforms, copilots, or automation tools
• Startup or scale-up experience

• Join a growing team investing heavily in AI and emerging technologies
• Work on real-world AI products and production systems
• Hybrid London role with flexible working
• Strong progression opportunities within a modern engineering environment
• Competitive salary, bonus, and benefits package

Oscar Associates (UK) Limited is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.

To understand more about what we do with your data please review our privacy policy in the privacy section of the Oscar website.