Lead Ai Engineer

Description:

This Lead AI Engineer will operate as an independent, initiative-driven IC - spotting opportunities, shaping the roadmap with stakeholders, and shipping production-grade AI systems that prove value quickly. You’ll work across GenAI and applied ML. Typical initiatives include LLM-powered personalisation/agent workflows, and optimisation/forecasting solutions across physical sites (maintenance processes, utilities spend, and member experience at scale).

Role summary

This is a Lead IC role for someone who thrives on autonomy. You’ll take loosely-defined problems, structure them into deliverable projects, align stakeholders, and build robust systems that run reliably in production. There’s no requirement to manage people — but you’ll lead through ownership, standards, and execution.

Key responsibilities

• Independently identify high-value AI opportunities and propose delivery plans
• Scope projects: define objectives, success metrics, risks, and dependencies
• Build and deploy end-to-end AI solutions (from brief to monitored production services)
• Own GenAI delivery: RAG, orchestration/agent workflows, evaluation, guardrails
• Build APIs/services integrating data sources, models, and downstream consumers
• Drive engineering quality: observability, latency, reliability, security, cost control
• Partner with senior stakeholders to prioritise and deliver measurable outcomes

What they’re looking for

• 6+ years’ experience delivering production AI/ML systems
• Strong Python and SQL
• Proven hands-on GenAI experience (LLMs/RAG; LangChain/LlamaIndex/LangGraph-style tooling preferred)
• A track record of autonomous ownership - running projects with minimal supervision
• Strong stakeholder engagement: can influence and communicate with non-technical leaders
• Comfortable working in an entrepreneurial, “build first” environment
• MLOps/CI/CD exposure (monitoring, deployment patterns, model lifecycle)