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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