Lead Applied AI Engineer

The role

You will lead the Applied AI team within the AI Centre of Excellence. You will set technical direction and manage engineers who build and improve AI-enabled systems and SaaS platforms.

What you will do

• Lead and line-manage Applied AI engineers, providing coaching and managing performance.
• Set the team technical direction and delivery roadmap with stakeholders.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for applied and agentic AI workflows and integrations.
• Set standards for building, testing and evaluating tool-using agents.
• Own operational performance across AI-enabled services and SaaS platforms.
• Own account management for third-party SaaS suppliers.
• Manage the supplier and contract lifecycle with procurement, finance, legal and security.
• Establish engineering and operational standards for change management and governance.

Required qualifications

• Experience line-managing engineers, coaching and developing people, managing performance and leading delivery.
• Experience owning third-party supplier relationships, service reviews, escalations, licensing and renewals.
• Experience leading the administration and lifecycle management of cloud-based business systems.
• Strong experience delivering applied and agentic AI workflows including orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills designing and reviewing REST API, webhook and event-driven or scheduled integrations.
• Experience operating production services in cloud environments.
• Ability to explain technical and commercial trade-offs and influence stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Google ADK or similar frameworks
• Experience using Google Cloud Platform

Benefits

• Company pension contributions at 5%
• Individualised training budget
• Discounted holidays for you, your family and friends
• 25 days of holidays per annum (plus 8 public holidays) increases by 1 day for every second year of service, up to a maximum 30 days per annum
• Ability to buy and sell annual leave
• Cycle to work scheme
• Season ticket loan
• Eye care vouchers

Before you apply

• Intro with a member of the Talent Acquisition team - 30 mins
• 1st stage video interview with the hiring manager - 1 hour
• Applied AI technical leadership, team management and SaaS supplier management task
• Final stage with Director of Applied AI and senior stakeholders - 1 hour

About the company

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