Lead AI Engineer

Salary: Up to £100,000

Location: Gateshead

Hybrid: 1–2 days per week in the office

An established, product-led technology business is investing in AI, with an ambitious roadmap of new features and capabilities planned across its platform.

The platform is already making a meaningful difference to people's everyday lives, with technology playing a central role in delivering valuable, personalised experiences. The next stage of development will focus on using AI to make the product even more intelligent, accessible and effective for its users.

This creates an opportunity for a Lead AI Engineer to take ownership of AI development, shape the technical direction and establish AI engineering capability across the organisation.

Working alongside an experienced engineering team, the position combines hands-on development with technical leadership, taking AI-powered features from initial concept through to production.

Rather than joining an established AI function, there's genuine scope to influence architecture, introduce engineering standards and help shape how AI is developed and delivered across the business.

The role will involve making technical decisions around LLM integration, retrieval systems, model selection and wider system architecture, ensuring solutions are reliable, scalable and commercially viable.

There will also be a strong focus on AI evaluation, monitoring, security and cost management, alongside mentoring existing engineers and helping develop their AI capabilities.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role without direct reports initially, offering the opportunity to lead AI development while remaining closely involved in engineering.

Experience & Skills

  • Strong software engineering background, ideally within backend or full-stack development.
  • Commercial experience designing, building and deploying AI/LLM-powered applications into production.
  • Experience integrating LLMs, APIs and retrieval systems into software products.
  • Strong understanding of AI architecture, including model selection, evaluation, reliability and performance.
  • Experience making technical decisions around scalability, infrastructure and cost.
  • Ability to take technical ownership, influence architectural decisions and mentor other engineers.

Experience with RAG, tool calling, LLM orchestration and evaluation frameworks would be particularly relevant, alongside exposure to cloud AI services such as AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry or Google Vertex AI.

A background in TypeScript or Python would be useful, although the emphasis is on strong software engineering fundamentals and genuine experience delivering AI solutions rather than a specific programming language.

Apply to find out more.