Senior AI Engineer

iO Associates are working with a UK-based company building mission-critical AI systems. They're looking for a Senior AI Engineer to join on a contract basis and build agentic AI systems in production, including secure deployments.

Job Title: Senior AI Engineer
Location: UK (Hybrid – occasional on-site in the South of England)
Contract Length: Initial 6 months
IR35: Outside IR35
Rate: Dependent on experience
Start: Immediate

Key Responsibilities

• Build agent-based AI systems end-to-end. Cover orchestration, state, and tool calling.
• Engineer for production. Focus on tests, reliability, latency, and failure handling.
• Use LLMs and vision-capable models in real workflows. Include retrieval, reasoning, summarisation, and task execution.
• Deploy across cloud and restricted environments. This includes on-prem and occasional offline use.
• Set up evaluation and monitoring. Leave clear documentation for handover.

Experience & Skills Required

• Senior software engineer (around 6+ years). Strong Python.
• Proven track record shipping LLM/agentic systems to production. Not just prototypes.
• Strong retrieval/search experience at scale. Comfortable with multi-terabyte datasets.
• Confident with Docker and Git. AWS experience is a plus.
• Secure deployment experience is beneficial. Especially on-prem or controlled networks.
  
  

If this role sounds like yourself, either apply to the role or send me an email on with your up to date CV and the best contact number and I will come back to you as soon as possible to arrange a call.

If you have someone in your network who could be a good fit, please do the same as above and we can discuss our referral scheme for successful candidates.