AI Subject Matter Expert
Job Description:
AI Subject Matter Expert (SME)
Location - Stevenage UK
Required Experience- 15+ Years
Overview
The AI Subject Matter Expert (SME) will provide hands-on leadership across technical delivery and strategic advisory initiatives, ensuring successful implementation of enterprise AI and GenAI solutions while supporting multiple teams and programs.
Must-Haves
Production Agentic System / LLM Pipeline Experience
- Has shipped a multi-phase Lang Graph (or equivalent) agentic workflow.
- Experience with retries branching, evaluations, and observability.
- Beyond notebook prototypes and proof-of-concepts.
RAG at Scale
- Comfortable with chunking strategies.
- Embedding model selection experience.
- Understanding of vector store trade-offs (Azure AI Search, pgvector, etc.).
- Experience with structured extraction from PDFs, Word documents, and HTML content.
Cloud-Native on Azure
Experience with:
- Azure OpenAI
- Azure Functions / Container Apps
- ADLS
- Cosmos DB
- Key Vault
- Application Insights
Bonus:
- Experience with GCP / Vertex AI.
Python Skills
- Strong working knowledge of Python.
- Ability to build, debug, and maintain production services.
Pragmatic About Evaluations
- Ability to establish evaluation harnesses for LLM pipelines.
- Understanding of:
- LLM-as-judge approaches
- Deterministic checks
- Human review processes
Agent Hardening Experience
- Prompt injection defense.
- Tool-use safety.
- Sandboxing.
- Understanding of failure modes in agentic systems beyond traditional RAG implementations.
MCP / Tool-Calling Fluency
- Familiarity with MCP servers.
- Function-calling patterns.
- Understanding of Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini tool conventions.
Clear Written Communication
- Produces high-quality design documents, ADRs, and review comments.
- Able to communicate effectively with technical and senior leadership audiences.
Nice-to-Haves
Life Sciences / Regulated Industry Context
- Understanding of:
- IHD
- GxP
- Consent scope
- Audit trail requirements
Familiarity with Governance-as-Code Concepts
Knowledge of:
- Data classification
- Data lineage
- FAIR principles
Frontend Competence for Internal Tools
- Streamlit
- Gradio
- React
Ability to create simple interfaces that help make concepts concrete.
Previous Technical Leadership Experience
- Has served as a Tech Lead, even on a small team.
- Experience balancing engineering decisions and delivery.
Additional Expectations
- Profile should be sufficiently hands-on and capable of operating across both technical delivery and strategic advisory activities.
- Should not be purely innovation or consulting focused.
- Enterprise GenAI / LLM implementation experience is highly valuable.
- Ability to provide architecture guidance.
- Ability to support multiple initiatives and teams in parallel.
Related Knowledge Areas
Data Quality & Governance
- Information Architecture (DKC)
- Data Quality
- Data Lineage
- AI Data Stewardship
- Product Backbone
- Governance Portal
- Metadata Management
- Catalog
- Semantic Data & Ontologies
- Master Data
Knowledge Areas
- Governance
- Information Architecture
- Lineage
- Quality
- FAIR Principles
- Regulatory and Industry Data Standards
- Business Context
- Processes
- Key Data Flows
Translating Business Needs into Trusted Data Products