Senior AI Engineer

Senior AI Engineer (Contract)

Rate: £600-£650 per day (Outside IR35)
Location: Hybrid, South Oxfordshire (2 days onsite, 3 days remote)
Duration: Initial 6 month contract with extension potential

The Opportunity

A rapidly growing UK-based AI technology company is seeking a highly experienced Senior AI Engineer to join a team building cutting-edge AI systems used in high-stakes operational environments.

The organisation develops advanced decision-support platforms that combine large-scale multimodal data sources, agentic AI, and intelligent orchestration to help users make faster, better-informed decisions. Their solutions are deployed in environments where reliability, explainability, and performance are critical.

This role offers the opportunity to work on complex, production-grade AI systems rather than proofs of concept, taking ownership of architecture, implementation, deployment, and optimisation across the full development lifecycle.

The Role

As a Senior Applied AI Engineer, you will design, build, and deploy production-ready agentic AI systems that operate reliably in demanding environments.

You will take ownership of system architecture, multi-agent workflows, retrieval and reasoning pipelines, model integration, and deployment strategies. The emphasis is on engineering robust, scalable systems that deliver dependable outcomes in real-world use cases.

This is a senior, hands-on engineering role suited to someone who builds AI products from first principles rather than simply integrating existing tools.

Essential Skills & Experience

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Demonstrable experience building and deploying LLM-based or agentic AI systems in production environments.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Commercial experience with frameworks such as:

• LangGraph
• LangChain
• Haystack
• Similar agent orchestration technologies

Experience designing scalable AI/ML architectures and production systems.Strong understanding of:

• Retrieval and search architectures
• Embeddings and vector databases
• Tool/function calling
• State management and memory
• Model inference and optimisation

Experience working with very large-scale multimodal datasets, including text, imagery, telemetry, and sensor data.Docker, Git, and cloud platform experience (AWS preferred).Experience deploying solutions into secure or regulated environments.Strong stakeholder communication and technical leadership capabilities.

Interested in hearing more? Please get in touch with Rebecca Long on 0117 332 8100 / r.long @ ioassociates.co.uk