Lead AI Software Engineer

Lead AI Software Engineer

Hammersmith, London (3 days a week in office) | £120,000 + bonus |

A profitable, privately owned financial services firm is hiring its first AI-first engineering leader.

This is not a VC-backed business chasing the next round. It is cash generative, reinvests its own profits, and is built around long-term relationships with both its clients and its people.

They are now moving their engineering function to an AI-first, product-engineering way of working: small, empowered teams shipping features fast by talking directly to stakeholders, rather than engineers working a fixed backlog. This role is deliberately being hired first, ahead of two further product engineering hires, so the right technical foundation and leadership are in place before the team grows.

What you will do:

• Assess the current team's capability, tooling and mindset, and define a clear AI strategy and roadmap for engineering
• Stay hands-on: write and review code yourself and use AI tools as a core part of your own practice, then use that credibility to lead a small existing team day to day toward faster, more frequent releases
• Make the architecture and tooling calls across the group's engineering function
• Build an AI-ready data layer that is secure, well governed and structured to support reliable AI development
• Review and improve the existing codebase, building better pipelines and ways of working rather than simply asking for more code
• Help define and interview for the two product engineer hires that follow, screening hard for high agency

What we are looking for

• A genuine, hands-on software engineering background, credible enough to write, review and turn around code to a high standard
• Strong fundamentals in a modern strongly-typed or object-oriented language (.NET, Java, Python, TypeScript or similar). Direct .NET experience is a plus but not essential if you can ramp quickly with AI-assisted tooling
• Real, practical use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot or similar) as a core part of how you build, with the ability to set tooling and workflow direction for a team
• Experience leading or mentoring a small team day to day, and winning people round to a new way of working rather than dictating it
• High agency: proactive, comfortable with loose requirements, and able to move from idea to shipped feature without waiting to be told

Package

• Salary c.£80,000 to £120,000 depending on experience
• Bonus Scheme
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Private healthcare cash plan, salary sacrifice pension, life cover at 3x salary, and cycle to work and EV schemes
• Hammersmith based, minimum 3 days a week in office, hours 08:30 to 18:00

If you want to lead an AI-first transformation from the ground up in a stable, profitable business, apply now.