Principal Consultant (AI/ML)

Principal AI/ML Consultant (Contract)

Location: London (2 days per week on-site, remainder remote)

Contract: 6 months, Outside IR35

Start: ASAP

Overview

A leading digital technology consultancy is seeking a Principal AI/ML Consultant to lead strategic technical transformation within a financial services environment. This is a hands-on, client-facing role focused on modernising legacy systems, driving AI adoption, and delivering measurable business value.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the systematic modernisation of legacy services, prioritising based on business impact.
• Eliminate technical debt by extracting APIs, decommissioning obsolete services, and consolidating functionality.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to identify and deliver high-impact modernisation opportunities.
• Support platform services strategy by transforming legacy services into reusable, shared components.
• Drive adoption of AI tooling (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate development and modernisation.
• Create playbooks and replicable patterns for AI-enabled development and modernisation.
• Use LLMs and AI for service discovery, dependency mapping, code analysis, refactoring, and documentation.
• Demonstrate and quantify business value from AI adoption.
• Ensure modernised services are handed off with clear ownership and integrated into new workflows.

Skills & Experience

• Proven experience leading technical teams and modernising complex legacy systems at scale.
• Strong architectural skills and ability to design logical abstractions for legacy code.
• Experience managing mixed teams of employees and contractors.
• Hands-on experience implementing AI/LLMs in software development workflows.
• Proficiency with modern AI development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot).
• Demonstrated ability to deliver measurable productivity improvements from AI adoption.
• Experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government) is highly desirable.
• Commercial awareness and ability to translate technical work into business outcomes.
• Pragmatic, delivery-focused mindset with a bias for action and incremental improvement.

Desirable

• Knowledge of institutional trading requirements and B2B platform architecture.
• Background in platform engineering or developer productivity.
• Experience with federated open-source contribution models.