AI Engineering Lead - AI Practice

AI Engineering Lead - AI Practice (Leading Consultancy)

London (hybrid) | Up to £135,000 base + profit share + benefits

We're working with one of the UK's leading technology and management consultancies on a newly created role to lead the technical side of their AI practice.

The commercial leadership is already in place. What they need now is a builder: someone to lead the technical side and grow a team of AI engineers from the ground up, who still enjoys getting hands-on.

Their view is simple. A lot of SaaS products and business tools are going to be rebuilt with AI, and they want to be the ones doing the building. The work might mean rebuilding a client's CRM in a couple of weeks, setting up AI environments properly, or automating the heavy lifting with whatever gets the job done, whether that's Claude, Copilot, n8n, Make, Power Automate or LangGraph.

What you'll be doing

• Leading the technical direction and delivery for the AI practice
• Hiring, building and developing a team of technical people beneath you
• Designing and building AI-powered products and solutions for clients, quickly and properly
• Setting up client AI environments, including governance, security and data controls such as Microsoft Purview and Copilot
• Working with partners and clients to turn ambition into working software

What you'll bring

• A strong engineering background, typically starting in cloud or data engineering, and the last few years spent building with AI in production
• Experience leading technical teams, or the clear ability and appetite to build one
• A track record of shipping real AI and automation solutions, not just strategy decks
• Hands-on depth across modern AI and automation tooling, without being wedded to a single stack
• The confidence to work directly with senior clients. A consulting background is useful but not essential

This is a rare chance to build something with a top-tier brand behind you, client demand already there, and the freedom to hire the team you'd want to work with. With a strong client base in the Government sector, this role requires the applicant to be eligible to undergo security clearance.