AI Engineer

*SC CLEARED*
AI Engineer
6 Month contract initially + Extensions
Based: Remotely
Rate: £525 - £625 p/d - (via Umbrella company)

We have a great opportunity with a world leading organisation where you will be provided with all of the support and development to succeed. A progressive organisation where you can really make a difference. We have a great opportunity for an AI Engineer to join the team.

The AI Engineer role will be responsible for working within a Product squad to design, build and deliver GenAI and Agentic AI products.

The individual must have hands-on experience developing production-grade GenAI/Agentic AI solutions using LLMs, RAG and agentic workflow technologies. The role requires strong Python software engineering skills alongside practical experience designing reliable, secure and maintainable AI-enabled applications.

Key Responsibilities
Technical Scoping & Estimation: Break down product requirements and user stories into technical tasks, provide estimates, identify dependencies, risks and integration requirements, and support delivery planning.
Data Analysis, Engineering & Discovery: Explore and assess structured and unstructured data, identify key data dependencies and quality issues, and prepare, transform and integrate data for use in RAG pipelines, agentic workflows and downstream applications.
Agentic AI Development: Design and implement multi-step Agentic AI workflows using frameworks such as LangGraph, including workflow state, routing, parallel execution, tool use, human-in-the-loop review, checkpointing and recovery.
LLM Application Development: Design and develop LLM-powered application capabilities, including prompt engineering, structured outputs, context management, model configuration and validation of model responses.
RAG & Knowledge Retrieval: Design and implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation solutions, including document ingestion, parsing and chunking, embeddings, indexing, semantic/hybrid search, filtering, reranking and evidence grounding.
AI Evaluation & Assurance: Develop approaches to evaluate LLM and RAG quality, including grounding, retrieval quality, hallucination, output consistency and regression testing. Implement appropriate guardrails, human review, citations, traceability and auditability.
Reliability & Error Handling: Design AI workflows to handle rate limits, timeouts, malformed model outputs, partial failures and other non-deterministic behaviours, including retry, recovery and resumability where required.
Observability & Monitoring: Implement logging, tracing and monitoring across LLM calls, agent workflows and retrieval pipelines to support troubleshooting, performance monitoring, quality assurance and operational support.
Security & Data Access: Ensure AI solutions follow appropriate authentication, authorisation, data access and secure development practices, particularly when integrating agents with enterprise systems and sensitive information.
Testing & Peer Review: Develop automated tests for AI and application components, participate in peer reviews and ensure solutions meet agreed quality, security and engineering standards.
Performance, Cost & Scalability: Consider model selection, token usage, latency, concurrency, retrieval performance and infrastructure cost when designing and optimising AI solutions.
Technical Documentation: Create and maintain documentation covering solution design, workflows, prompts, dependencies, APIs, operational considerations and support requirements.
Collaboration & Communication: Work closely with cross-functional teams, including product managers, BA's, Product Owners and software and platform engineers, to deliver high-quality AI products

Key Skills/knowledge/experience:
Strong Python software engineering experience
Hands-on experience developing GenAI/LLM applications
Hands-on experience designing and implementing Agentic AI workflows
Experience with LangGraph
Strong understanding of LLM workflow design, including state, routing, tools, structured outputs and human-in-the-loop patterns
Practical experience designing and implementing RAG architectures
Experience with document ingestion, chunking, embeddings and vector/semantic search
Experience with prompt engineering and structured LLM outputs
Experience with AI/LLM evaluation, testing and quality assurance
Understanding of guardrails, grounding, hallucination mitigation and AI assurance
Experience building and integrating APIs and Back End services
Strong understanding of software engineering principles, automated testing, code review and maintainable application design
Experience handling LLM and agent failure scenarios, retries, error handling and recovery
Understanding of observability and tracing for GenAI/Agentic AI applications
Azure AI & Cloud Services: Hands-on experience building and deploying AI solutions on Azure, including Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Azure AI Foundry, Cosmos DB, Redis, Azure Monitor/Application Insights, Managed Identity and Key Vault.

This is an excellent opportunity on a great project of work, If you are looking for your next exciting opportunity, apply now for your CV to reach me directly, we will respond as soon as possible.

Due to the nature and urgency of this post, candidates holding or who have held high level security clearance in the past are most welcome to apply. Please note successful applicants will be required to be security cleared prior to appointment which can take a minimum 10 weeks. LA International is an award-winning partner of choice for many of the world's most influential companies and government organisations. Holding Enhanced Government Security Accreditation, we are recognised as the European market leader in the delivery of Security Cleared talent to organisations that demand the very highest levels of security, compliance and assurance.

An award-winning organisation, having secured the prestigious Queens Award for Enterprise: International Trade over multiple years. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, equitable and accessible workplace where everyone feels valued and supported. We welcome applications from all individuals, regardless of background or identity, and we encourage candidates who may not meet every listed requirement to still apply. If you require any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to ensure a fair and accessible experience.

Please Note: If a high volume of applications is received, only candidates shortlisted will be contacted.