AI Engineering Lead – Technical Strategy & Delivery

Blend; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Blend is seeking a senior AI Engineering leader to shape direction, quality and growth of our AI Engineering capability. You will influence technical strategy, engage with major client engagements, and stay hands-on on complex problems with engineers and clients.

You will drive architecture, standards and delivery across multi-project workstreams, ensuring high-quality outcomes while mentoring senior engineers and shaping capability growth.

Qualifications

• 10+ years’ experience across AI, data and software engineering, including 3+ years leading engineering teams or a substantial technical function within consulting or professional services.
• Experience operating beyond individual project leadership with responsibility for technical direction, engineering quality or capability across multiple teams.
• Deep technical credibility. Comfortable working in production Python, substantial codebases and API-driven systems that need to perform reliably at scale.
• Recent, personal experience architecting and building production AI systems. Discuss retrieval strategy, caching, context economics, serving constraints, evaluation, observability.
• Strong systems thinking across unfamiliar platforms and problems.
• Experience leading complex programmes or multiple concurrent engineering workstreams, with accountability for technical direction, planning, resourcing, risk and delivery outcomes.
• Judgement to know when to intervene personally and when to lead through others, delegating effectively without giving up accountability for technical quality.
• Experience developing senior engineers and technical leaders, shaping team capability and raising the engineering bar across a wider organisation.
• Commercial awareness to turn a technical solution into a realistic scope, team shape, estimate and delivery plan, and to challenge assumptions.
• Experience contributing to account growth, technical propositions or go-to-market activity within a consulting organisation.
• Confidence operating with senior clients and executives while remaining credible with engineers at code and architecture level.
• Ability to make difficult technical calls, create clarity where there is ambiguity and take responsibility for the outcome.
• Strong experience with Databricks and Azure OpenAI, which underpin much of our delivery.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction across AI Engineering, defining architecture principles, engineering standards and delivery practices.
• Own the technical quality of major AI engagements, especially where architecture, scale or risk requires senior leadership.
• Lead across multiple projects and workstreams, setting priorities while ensuring teams can execute independently.
• Design and review production AI architectures, including retrieval/ knowledge layers, agentic pipelines, multilingual systems and trade-offs like cost and latency.
• Remain hands-on on hard problems: reviewing code, prototyping approaches and resolving architectural issues.
• Run design reviews that raise the engineering bar and foster accountable technical decisions.
• Act as senior technical counterpart to clients, including CxO and architecture leadership.
• Own the technical quality of major AI proposals, translating concepts into architectures, scopes and delivery models.
• Collaborate with commercial/account leadership to shape technical propositions and investment.
• Develop senior engineers and leaders to scale the department.
• Shape the AI Engineering capability plan, including hiring priorities and team composition.

Skills

AI Engineering Leadership

Production Python

Databricks

Azure OpenAI

Systems Thinking

Architecting AI Systems

Multi-project Leadership

Tools

Python

APIs

Databricks

Azure OpenAI

Job description

Blend is seeking a senior AI Engineering leader to shape direction, quality and growth of our AI Engineering capability. You will influence technical strategy, engage with major client engagements, and stay hands-on on complex problems with engineers and clients.

You will drive architecture, standards and delivery across multi-project workstreams, ensuring high-quality outcomes while mentoring senior engineers and shaping capability growth.