AI Platform Engineer

AI Platform Engineer
LLMs | RAG | Python | Cloud Infrastructure
Manchester City Centre - 5 days a week onsite 
Up to £100,000 DOE

The Opportunity
We're looking for an AI Platform Engineer to build, optimise and maintain the infrastructure behind a growing portfolio of AI-powered applications.
You'll focus on developing scalable, reliable services supporting large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), intelligent search and conversational AI. You'll take ownership of existing solutions while helping bring new AI capabilities into production.

Key Responsibilities
- Design, build and optimise production-grade AI platforms, RAG pipelines and LLM integrations.
- Develop scalable cloud-native services and backend infrastructure using Microsoft Azure.
- Improve the performance, reliability and latency of AI applications and retrieval workflows.
- Manage infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and support containerised deployments.
- Build CI/CD pipelines and automate data ingestion, embedding generation and vector indexing.
- Implement monitoring, logging, tracing and performance optimisation across AI workloads.
- Apply security, access controls, versioning and governance best practices.
- Collaborate with AI, software engineering, DevOps and security teams to deliver production-ready solutions.

Skills & Experience
- Strong Python development skills.
- Commercial experience delivering solutions using Microsoft Azure.
- Experience with data integration and ETL pipelines, such as Azure Data Factory.
- Familiarity with vector databases or search technologies, such as OpenSearch.
- Experience with Terraform, infrastructure-as-code and containerised applications.
- Understanding of APIs, microservices and cloud-native architecture.
- Experience supporting production systems, with a focus on scalability, reliability and performance.

Desirable Experience
- Building or supporting production AI applications using LLMs and RAG.
- Experience with embedding models, vector search and LLM orchestration.
- Familiarity with observability tooling such as OpenTelemetry.
- Experience taking AI prototypes and proof-of-concepts into production.

The Ideal Candidate
A proactive engineer with a strong sense of ownership, excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to turn emerging AI capabilities into reliable, scalable production services.

Sponsorship is not available
Only candidates based in UK and eligible to work in UK are allowed