Lead AI Engineer

Lead AI Engineer Location: Hybrid - London (Flexible) Salary: from £80,000 + bonus + benefits Contract: Permanent, Full-time About the Company 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. The Role 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. Key Responsibilities

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

Required Background & Skills

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

Nice to Have

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

Why Apply?

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

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