Principal Artificial Intelligence Engineer

Lead AI Engineer / Consultant - Greenfield

Outside IR35

£600 - £750pd flexible for the right person

RAG experience a must.

About the Company

Market leading SaaS organisation building out their AI function.

About the Role

This project is a greenfield build out of AI capabilities. They are starting with RAG use cases as a low bar, but are targeting a rich Agentic implementation in the near term. The incumbent has an opportunity to work on the foundational architectural definition and implementation.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on AI Engineer at principal/staff level to build an AI team to deliver an AI capability.
• Lead design, architecture, and delivery of advanced AI/ML and generative AI solutions, ensuring scalable, secure, and production-ready system.
• Expert in MCP and RAG patterns.
• Design and build robust data and ingestion pipelines, integrate vector databases, and RSG.
• Expert-level proficiency in Python and key ML libraries (Langchain, Semantic Kernel, PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, ECS).
• Strong background in deploying models via APIs, containers, or cloud-native services.
• Proven track record delivering production-grade AI solutions in complex, data-rich environments.
• Skilled in setting team engineering practices: Git, CI/CD, automated testing for ML code, code reviews, and documentation.
• Lead tech enablement
• Excellent communication skills
• Experience in setting up AI functions

Qualifications

Minimum 5 years' professional experience in AI, ML, or applied machine learning engineering roles.

Required Skills

• Expert-level proficiency in Python and key ML libraries (Langchain, Semantic Kernel, PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, ECS).
• Strong background in deploying models via APIs, containers, or cloud-native services.
• Proven track record delivering production-grade AI solutions in complex, data-rich environments.
• Skilled in setting team engineering practices: Git, CI/CD, automated testing for ML code, code reviews, and documentation.

Preferred Skills

• Expert in MCP and RAG patterns.
• Experience in developing agentic AI systems
• Lead tech enablement and mentor engineers, fostering culture of reliability, continuous improvement, and collaboration.
• Excellent communication skills, able to translate technical strategy into business outcomes and work across team.

Send us along your cv now for immediate consideration on this role as we are interviewing this week.