Senior AI Engineer

Project overview

Senior AI Engineer (Contract)

Project details

£600-£650 per day (Outside IR35)

Hybrid, South Oxfordshire (2 days onsite, 3 days remote)

Initial 6 month contract with extension potential

The Opportunity

A rapidly growing UK-based AI technology company is seeking a highly experienced Senior AI Engineer to join a team building cutting-edge AI systems used in high-stakes operational environments.

The organisation develops advanced decision-support platforms that combine large-scale multimodal data sources, agentic AI, and intelligent orchestration to help users make faster, better-informed decisions. Their solutions are deployed in environments where reliability, explainability, and performance are critical.

This role offers the opportunity to work on complex, production-grade AI systems rather than proofs of concept, taking ownership of architecture, implementation, deployment, and optimisation across the full development lifecycle.

The Role

As a Senior Applied AI Engineer, you will design, build, and deploy production-ready agentic AI systems that operate reliably in demanding environments.

You will take ownership of system architecture, multi-agent workflows, retrieval and reasoning pipelines, model integration, and deployment strategies. The emphasis is on engineering robust, scalable systems that deliver dependable outcomes in real-world use cases.

This is a senior, hands-on engineering role suited to someone who builds AI products from first principles rather than simply integrating existing tools.

Essential Skills & Experience

Interested in hearing more? Please get in touch with Rebecca Long on [contact removed]/[contact removed]

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Demonstrable experience building and deploying LLM-based or agentic AI systems in production environments.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Commercial experience with frameworks such as:
• LangGraph
• LangChain
• Haystack
• Similar agent orchestration technologies
• Experience designing scalable AI/ML architectures and production systems.
• Strong understanding of:
• Retrieval and search architectures
• Embeddings and vector databases
• Tool/function calling
• State management and memory
• Model inference and optimisation
• Experience working with very large-scale multimodal datasets, including text, imagery, telemetry, and sensor data.
• Docker, Git, and cloud platform experience (AWS preferred).
• Experience deploying solutions into secure or regulated environments.
• Strong stakeholder communication and technical leadership capabilities.
• Start: flexible
• Location: Harwell, Oxfordshire, England, UK, GB
• Rate: 75-81 EUR/h