AI Platform Engineer

The Gym Limited; London Borough of Wandsworth; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

The Gym Group is hiring an AI Platform Engineer to design and operate an AI-native shared platform in a hybrid setup (Clapham Junction 3 days/wk). You will build SDKs, APIs, and governance that enable teams to deploy AI features while ensuring security, observability and cost controls across enterprise data connections.

You will collaborate with AI engineers, tech leads and ambassadors to turn common needs into reusable platform capabilities and maintain reliability through SRE practices.

Qualifications

• Practical, hands-on experience with AI tooling in production: coding agents, enterprise AI assistants, model APIs, retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation frameworks.
• Proven experience building and operating production platforms in platform engineering, cloud engineering, DevOps or site reliability, with a developer‑experience focus.
• Strong technical skills in Microsoft Azure or equivalent cloud, containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure as code and CI/CD.
• Experience building developer-facing products - SDKs, APIs, templates, golden paths - and measuring their adoption and impact.
• Experience integrating enterprise systems through APIs and connectors with identity, secrets management and role‑based access control built in.
• Proficiency in Python and at least one other production language.
• Experience managing cloud cost, capacity and vendor relationships, including FinOps principles.

Responsibilities

• Creating SDKs, APIs, prompt libraries, agent harnesses and golden paths that make AI-native engineering the easy default for our technology teams.
• Building and running the shared AI platform: model access and routing, identity, secrets, monitoring and connectors to enterprise data and collaboration systems.
• Building the integrations and shared context that make enterprise AI services genuinely useful to colleagues across the business, with access that respects existing permissions.
• Designing and implementing technical guardrails and security controls - including audit logging, data isolation and action limits for agentic use - rather than relying on policy alone.
• Providing cost, usage and vendor visibility, and planning for model and provider change so we are never locked in to a single dependency.
• Partnering with the Applied AI Engineer, Tech Leads and AI Ambassadors to turn recurring needs into reusable platform capabilities.
• Keeping the platform to clear reliability and recovery standards, with observability, alerting and runbooks maintained with Site Reliability Engineering.
• Documenting what you build and sharing ownership across the team so the platform never depends on one person.

Skills

AI tooling

Platform engineering

DevOps

Site reliability

Python

Tools

Azure

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

Job description

AI Platform Engineer

Location: Hybrid (Clapham Junction 3 days a week)

We’re The Gym Group... We’re one of the UK’s leading fitness businesses. With more than one million members, 265+ gyms and ambitious plans to keep growing, we’re the UK’s second-largest gym operator by membership and the fourth largest in Europe. Our mission is simple: to break down barriers to fitness for all. We’re large enough to make a meaningful difference, but agile enough for individuals to influence how we grow. Technology, data and new ideas play a central role - and you’ll have the opportunity to take ownership, challenge how things are done and see the impact of your work. Just as importantly, we’re a people-first business where everyone is encouraged to be themselves. We’ve been named one of The Sunday Times Best Places to Work and awarded Investors in People Gold, alongside a host of other awards recognising our culture and our people.

What you'll be doing...

• Creating SDKs, APIs, prompt libraries, agent harnesses and golden paths that make AI-native engineering the easy default for our technology teams.
• Building and running the shared AI platform: model access and routing, identity, secrets, monitoring and connectors to enterprise data and collaboration systems.
• Building the integrations and shared context that make enterprise AI services genuinely useful to colleagues across the business, with access that respects existing permissions.
• Designing and implementing technical guardrails and security controls - including audit logging, data isolation and action limits for agentic use - rather than relying on policy alone.
• Providing cost, usage and vendor visibility, and planning for model and provider change so we are never locked in to a single dependency.
• Partnering with the Applied AI Engineer, Tech Leads and AI Ambassadors to turn recurring needs into reusable platform capabilities.
• Keeping the platform to clear reliability and recovery standards, with observability, alerting and runbooks maintained with Site Reliability Engineering.
• Documenting what you build and sharing ownership across the team so the platform never depends on one person.

What we’re looking for...

• Practical, hands‑on experience with AI tooling in production: coding agents, enterprise AI assistants, model APIs, retrieval‑augmented generation and evaluation frameworks.
• Proven experience building and operating production platforms in platform engineering, cloud engineering, DevOps or site reliability, with a developer‑experience focus.
• Strong technical skills in Microsoft Azure or equivalent cloud, containers and Kubernetes, infrastructure as code and CI/CD.
• Experience building developer‑facing products - SDKs, APIs, templates, golden paths - and measuring their adoption and impact.
• Experience integrating enterprise systems through APIs and connectors with identity, secrets management and role‑based access control built in.
• Proficiency in Python and at least one other production language.
• Experience managing cloud cost, capacity and vendor relationships, including FinOps principles.

We also want to put it out there that we actively encourage applications from a diverse demographic and we are passionate about your culture and value alignment.

Your application may be reviewed by an AI tool to help assess your suitability based on the information you provide. Automated decision‑making is never used - every application is reviewed and all decisions, including whether to progress your application, are made exclusively by a member of our recruitment team. Your data will be handled in accordance with our Privacy Policy and UK GDPR #LI-CJ1.

We are a disability confident and inclusive employer which is something we are truly proud of.

We offer a fantastic place to work in a great working culture and were recognised as #25 in the Top 50 places to work in the UK in 2022! We may be one of the leading budget gym chains in the UK but there’s nothing budget about our investment into our people. We have retained GOLD in our investors in people award for the last 6 years and were awarded silver in wellbeing last year. We’re also recognised as a disability confident and inclusive employer which is something we are truly proud of. We have been through some great and positive change recently from our shiny new "super G" logo to our exciting digital projects and our plans are to keep being innovative, creative and agile in all that we do and we want to do that sustainably. We hire people with real passion, positivity and enthusiasm who motivate and inspire those around them. Our vision is to have a diverse, high performing, engaged workforce that love what they do! We have a brilliant team and opportunities for development and growth with support for success. We don't want to stand still, we're growing, innovating and adapting, we're with you to reach you career goals too.