Lead AI Engineer

Your new company
You'll be joining a well-established digital consultancy with a strong track record of delivering innovative technology solutions. They're growing their AI capability and need an experienced Lead AI Engineer for a large-scale, high-impact AI programme.

Your new role
As Lead AI Engineer, you'll be the hands-on technical lead for the programme. You'll take the architectural direction and turn it into production-grade AI systems that work with complex legacy and multi-cloud environments handling sensitive, high-volume data. You'll work in a mixed team with client-side colleagues, write code yourself and mentor other engineers. Your responsibilities will include:

Designing, building and shipping production AI components such as RAG pipelines, semantic search, embedding infrastructure, orchestration logic and integration layers
Leading engineering within your squad by setting coding standards, reviewing designs and pull requests, and solving complex technical problems
Building Responsible AI guardrails into live systems, including evaluation harnesses, bias checks and human-in-the-loop review points
Making sure AI services are secure by default and observable in production, with solid logging, monitoring, alerting and rollback
Pairing with internal engineers and upskilling them so the knowledge stays in-house
Choosing efficient, right-sized models and infrastructure that support sustainability commitments
What you'll need to succeed
You'll be an experienced, hands-on AI engineer who is comfortable leading technically while staying close to the code. You'll need:

Expert-level coding skills, typically in Python, applied to AI/ML systems in production
Strong hands-on experience with semantic search, vector databases or embeddings, and building RAG pipelines
Experience with LLM orchestration and agentic frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex or multi-agent patterns)
Prompt engineering skills, plus experience with systematic evaluation and guardrail tooling, such as hallucination detection and safety testing
LLMOps/MLOps experience, including model versioning, deployment, monitoring and rollback
Cloud-native engineering on AWS, Azure or GCP, including their AI/ML services
Experience with CI/CD, containerisation and infrastructure-as-code for AI workloads
Data engineering skills to build reliable pipelines from unstructured and legacy sources
An understanding of secure-by-design engineering for sensitive data
Experience working in agile, multidisciplinary teams
Desirable:

Cloud certifications at associate or professional level
Previous delivery of AI or digital services in UK central government or the wider public sector
Experience fine-tuning or adapting open-source or foundation models
Exposure to wider AI and automation technologies such as NLP, computer vision, RPA and predictive AI
What you'll get in return

A lead role on a high-profile, large-scale AI programme with real public impact
The chance to shape how AI is built and adopted across a major organisation
Hybrid working (one day a week on-site)
A collaborative, inclusive culture that values diversity and flexible working
What you need to do now
If you're interested in this role, click 'apply now' to forward an up-to-date copy of your CV, or call us now.
If this job isn't quite right for you, but you are looking for a new position, please contact us for a confidential discussion about your career.

Hays Specialist Recruitment Limited acts as an employment agency for permanent recruitment and employment business for the supply of temporary workers. By applying for this job you accept the T&C's, Privacy Policy and Disclaimers which can be found at (url removed)
Only candidates based in UK and eligible to work in UK are allowed