As Lead AI Engineer, you'll become a key technical voice within the AI team, combining hands-on engineering with architectural thinking and technical leadership.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Helping shape the organisation's AI technology strategy and engineering roadmap.
- Taking ownership of core AI platform infrastructure and ensuring it remains secure, reliable and scalable.
- Designing and improving cloud-based AI environments using Azure, AKS, Terraform and Helm
- Establishing strong software engineering practices covering development, testing, deployment and code quality.
- Developing robust approaches to monitoring, observability, performance and governance.
- Designing and integrating APIs using REST, webhooks, OpenAPI and appropriate authentication methods.
- Supporting the development of conversational AI solutions across chat and voice applications.
- Assessing emerging AI frameworks, platforms and technologies and recommending where they can add genuine value.
- Providing technical guidance and mentorship to engineers across the wider AI function.
- Acting as a senior escalation point for complex technical challenges.
- Helping introduce AI capability into new areas of the organisation.
- Establishing effective approaches to AI evaluation, documentation, auditability and responsible deployment.
- Championing engineering excellence and ensuring AI solutions are built to operate effectively at scale.
What We're Looking For
We're looking for an experienced engineer who understands that successful AI is about far more than building models or experimenting with prompts.
You'll ideally bring:
- A strong background in production software, AI or machine learning engineering.
- Experience building and operating reliable technology in production environments.
- Practical knowledge of LLM application development, including RAG, structured extraction, evaluation, prompt/context engineering and agentic workflows.
- Strong API integration experience, including REST, webhooks, OpenAPI, authentication and resilient integration patterns.
- Experience with Microsoft Azure and ideally AKS, Terraform, Helm and Azure Pipelines.
- A good understanding of observability, governance, security and operational resilience.
- Experience working within environments where data protection, auditability and risk management are important.
- The confidence to make technical and architectural decisions and explain the reasoning behind them.
- Experience mentoring other engineers and helping to raise engineering standards.
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Why This Opportunity?
This isn't simply another AI engineering position.
You'll have the opportunity to help define how AI is built, deployed and scaled across an established organisation, working alongside senior leadership with the backing and investment to make meaningful changes.
You’ll have the chance to influence architecture, technology choices and engineering standards while working with some of the most exciting developments in generative AI and intelligent automation.
What's on Offer?
- Excellent salary DOE
- Hybrid working
- Flexible working arrangements
- Generous holiday allowance
- Additional holiday purchase options
- Private wellbeing and mental health support
- Professional development and career progression opportunities
- Learning and development programmes
- Employee recognition initiatives
- A collaborative and forward-thinking technology environment
Ready to Shape the Future of AI?
If you're an experienced AI or software engineer who wants to move beyond experimentation and help build production-grade AI capability at scale, this could be the opportunity you've been waiting for.
Apply today or contact Beautiful Recruitment for a confidential conversation about the role.
