AI Engineer

Carbon 60; City Of London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Guidant, Carbon60, Lorien & SRG - The Vertage Group Portfolio is seeking an AI/GenAI Engineer for a contract role at Heathrow. You will build, evaluate, and operate production-grade AI applications and agents, enabling integration with enterprise systems and reusable tooling.

You will implement deterministic AI components, guardrails, and monitoring to ensure reliable performance in real-world conditions, collaborating with senior engineers and stakeholders under client pressure.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals including APIs, cloud, testing and production operations.
• Practical knowledge of large language model (LLM) application patterns.
• Habit of improving systems through measurable evaluation rather than demos.

Responsibilities

• Build, evaluate, and operate AI applications, agents, and reusable tooling for production use.
• Implement agents, AI-assisted workflows, retrieval systems, and model integrations.
• Develop automated evaluations for quality, safety, reliability, and regression detection.
• Implement guardrails, permissions, traceability, fallback, and human-escalation mechanisms.
• Monitor cost, latency, behavior, and business outcomes.
• Diagnose production failures and continuously improve performance.
• Contribute reusable components, standards, and reference implementations.

Skills

Software engineering fundamentals

LLM application patterns

Measurable evaluation

Job description

AI / GenAI Engineer (Contract)

Our client, a leading British airline, is scaling AI across its business. They are hiring AI/GenAI Engineers to build production-grade AI that works in real operating conditions.

Location: Heathrow Type: Contract

The role

This is a software engineering role specialised in AI, not a prompt-writing or experimentation-only position. You'll build, evaluate, and operate AI applications, agents, and reusable tooling that other teams can build on.

What you'll do

• Implement agents, AI-assisted workflows, retrieval systems, and model integrations
• Build the deterministic tools and APIs agents use to interact with enterprise systems
• Develop automated evaluations for quality, safety, reliability, and regression detection
• Implement guardrails, permissions, traceability, fallback, and human-escalation mechanisms
• Monitor cost, latency, behaviour, and business outcomes
• Diagnose production failures and keep improving performance
• Contribute reusable components, standards, and reference implementations

What you'll bring

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: APIs, cloud systems, testing, and production operations
• Practical knowledge of LLM application patterns
• A habit of improving systems through measurable evaluation, not subjective demos

Multiple seniority levels are considered, but the engineering fundamentals are essentialIdeal candidates from strategy consulting backgrounds

We're keen to hear from engineers who have built their careers in the technology and AI arms of firms such as McKinsey (QuantumBlack), BCG (BCG X), or Bain. You'll understand how AI creates value for the business, communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders, and are used to delivering under client pressure. You should also be a hands-on builder who ships and operates code, not only someone who advises on it.

Guidant, Carbon60, Lorien & SRG - The Vertage Group Portfolio are acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy