Lead Generative AI Engineer

The role

You will set the technical standard for generative AI work across the function and own the architecture of complex, product-facing GenAI systems. You will also build the hardest parts of that work yourself and develop the senior engineers around you.

What you will do

• Set the architecture standard for complex GenAI work across the function.
• Hold sign-off on materially complex AI systems, catching architectural, safety and reliability problems before production.
• Own shared foundations: retrieval patterns, evaluation infrastructure, data pipelines and tooling.
• Build the hardest pieces of work directly and act as the technical escalation point for the function.
• Design systems that degrade gracefully and stay affordable at production scale, covering cost and latency.
• Develop senior engineers by handing them harder problems, room to own decisions and honest feedback.
• Shape how the team hires and reviews, with a clear view of what good looks like.
• Bring specific industry insight into planning and explain what developments mean for the architecture.

Required qualifications

• Experience setting technical direction that other engineering teams actually adopted.
• Strong Python.
• SQL, used in practice.
• Deep, current expertise across the GenAI stack, including retrieval at scale, vector stores, agentic orchestration, multimodal work, evaluation infrastructure and fine-tuning.
• Fluency in MLOps tooling, deployment and cloud infrastructure (AWS and GCP).
• Experience designing systems that work in production and being accountable when they did not.
• A strong point of view on evaluation, including the difference between evals that catch regressions and evals that provide comfort.
• Ability to explain hard technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Self-awareness about the limits of your knowledge and the instinct to bring in expertise early.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Equity scheme
• 25 days holiday
• Flexible working (2 days a week in the London office)
• Private medical insurance via BUPA
• Life assurance
• Pension scheme (employer contributes 5%)
• Enhanced family leave (e.g. 26 weeks full pay for maternity or adoption)
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme
• EV leasing scheme
• Cycle to work scheme
• Nursery salary sacrifice scheme

About the company

Motorway is the UK's largest online car-selling platform, connecting private sellers directly with over 8,000 dealers nationwide. It was founded in 2017 and has raised £143 million in Series C funding.