Senior/Lead AI Engineer

Senior AI Engineer | Guildford, UK | AI, LLMs & Automation | £110,000 – £140,000 + Bonus

We’re partnered with a high-growth, private equity-backed business that has spent the last several years completely rebuilding its technology platform from the ground up. With a modern cloud-native stack, over 15 years of proprietary data, and a dedicated AI function, they’re now entering the next phase of their journey: turning AI from proof-of-concept into business-critical products used every day.

This is an opportunity to join at a pivotal moment.

The foundations are in place. The data platform is established. The business is fully committed to AI. Now they’re looking for a senior engineer who can help build intelligent systems that automate workflows, surface knowledge, improve productivity, and shape the future of how an entire professional services industry operates.

You’ll work across the full AI lifecycle, from data engineering and experimentation through to deployment, monitoring, optimisation, and technical leadership. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys building production systems rather than research projects.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and deploy production-grade AI applications using LLMs, retrieval systems and modern AI architectures
• Develop intelligent solutions using techniques such as RAG, vector search, prompt orchestration and agent-based workflows
• Build scalable data pipelines and data preparation workflows using Databricks, Python, PySpark and SQL
• Evaluate, benchmark and continuously improve AI systems through robust testing and model evaluation frameworks
• Work closely with product, engineering and business stakeholders to translate real-world problems into AI-powered solutions
• Implement monitoring, observability and quality controls for production AI systems
• Establish best practices around MLOps, CI/CD, model versioning, reproducibility and deployment
• Contribute to architectural decisions and help define the future direction of the company’s AI capability
• Mentor engineers and help raise the technical standards across the wider team

Skills & Experience

• Strong commercial experience as a Senior AI Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer or AI-focused Data Engineer
• Expert Python development skills and experience building scalable backend systems
• Hands-on experience with Databricks in production environments
• Strong SQL and data engineering expertise including ETL/ELT and pipeline design
• Experience building and deploying LLM-powered applications in production
• Practical experience with RAG architectures, vector databases, embeddings and semantic search
• Experience evaluating, monitoring and improving AI systems after deployment
• Azure cloud experience, ideally including Azure OpenAI and related AI services
• Strong understanding of software engineering best practices, testing, version control and CI/CD
• Track record of leading projects, mentoring engineers and working directly with stakeholders

This is a rare opportunity to join a business where AI has executive sponsorship, significant investment, real datasets, and a clear roadmap for scaling AI products across the organisation. You’ll have the chance to influence strategy, own delivery, and help build systems that create measurable value from day one.

Interested? Apply with your CV for a confidential discussion.

Thanks,

Caroline Van Zyl