AI Engineer (Java OR Python) - Sheffield (Hybrid) - Inside IR35

(To save both our time, please don't apply if you don't agree with the daily rate)

Lead AI Platform Engineer

Location: Sheffield (Hybrid) 2x - 3x days per week onsite

Duration: 6 - 12 months rolling

Budget: £300 - £400 per day (D.O.E)

IR35: Inside IR35

We are looking for an experienced Lead AI Platform Engineer to take a hands-on technical leadership role within a large-scale Finance AI platform.

Mandatory Experience

• 7+ years' software engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on development experience with Java and/or Python.
• Experience building cloud-native applications on Azure, AWS or GCP.
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes, Microservices, APIs, Event-Driven Architecture and DevOps.
• Hands-on experience with LLM integration, RAG and Agentic AI.
• Experience with AI frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen or CrewAI.
• Strong understanding of enterprise architecture, scalability, security and production engineering.
• Proven experience providing technical leadership, mentoring engineers and contributing hands-on to delivery.

Desirable/Bonus Experience

• Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or similar platforms.
• Vector databases, knowledge retrieval and AI observability tooling.
• Banking, Financial Services or Treasury experience.
• Experience establishing AI engineering standards across multiple teams.