Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Lead AI Engineer

Haystack’s client is looking to recruit a Lead AI Engineer to join the Engineering Community and play a vital role in shaping and delivering AI-powered solutions across its large-scale, operationally critical client projects.

They’ve had some big AI wins over the last couple of years, from deploying AI solutions into the Public Healthcare Sector, supporting Energy Sector Providers to transform how their customer data is processed, and more recently, winning a spot on a Major Utilities Provider’s AI Framework.

This is a senior, client-facing technical leadership role focused on building production-grade AI systems that deliver measurable impact for our clients.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Defining AI solution architectures aligned to client strategy and business outcomes.
• Creating AI development roadmaps from proof-of-concept through to production deployment.
• Leading the design and build of LLM-based systems, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and multimodal applications.
• Ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, observable, and cost-optimised in cloud environments.
• Translating complex AI concepts into clear, actionable recommendations for stakeholders.
• Mentoring engineers and growing our AI capability within the Engineering Community.
• Working closely with senior client stakeholders to ensure AI solutions deliver measurable value (accuracy, latency, cost, UX, and adoption).

What You’ll Bring

• Proven experience leading technical delivery in client-facing consultancy or enterprise environments.
• Experience translating business problems into production-grade AI solutions.
• Hands-on leadership of cross-functional engineering teams.
• Agile software development experience with continuous delivery.
• Deep experience working with large language models in production environments, working with major model families such as Llama, Mistral, GPT, Claude, and Gemini.
• Experience integrating Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech models into end-user solutions.
• Experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, PGVector (or similar).
• Production deployment experience with AWS Bedrock, Azure Foundry, or Google Vertex AI.

The Perks

• Competitive salary
• Flexible annual leave (buy/sell and carry forward)
• Twice-a-year income-tax-free bonus based on company performance.
• Continuous training and development—if you want to learn, we’ll provide the support you need.
• Flexible Pension—we match your own contributions up to 5%.
• A flexible Healthcare cash plan so you can fund the care you value most.
• A packed social calendar including an end-of-year party (partners invited), summer away days, and monthly/quarterly team socials.
• Parking at Leeds office, plus Cycle2Work & Green Car Lease schemes.
• The chance to give back—get involved nationally and regionally with partnerships to get people from different backgrounds into tech, as well as charity and community events.