AI Platform Engineer- Manchester

The Portfolio Group; Manchester; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

The Portfolio Group in Manchester is seeking an AI Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate the AI platform that underpins our conversational assistant and broader AI initiatives. You will take responsibility for the runtime, infrastructure, and operational foundations underpinning our RAG pipelines, LLM orchestration, and vector search, built across Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Foundry.

Where prototypes and proof-of-concepts exist, you will be the one turning them into resilient,

Qualifications

• Proven enterprise delivery on the Azure stack.
• Experience with data pipelines and AI platforms is a plus.
• Familiarity with vector databases or search engines (e.g., OpenSearch).

Responsibilities

• Build and extend a scalable AI platform via Foundry.
• Own and optimise Foundry solutions for accuracy, scale and latency.
• Harden the production RAG pipeline for inference, retrieval and ingestion.
• Scale vector databases and embedding pipelines.
• Build end-to-end observability across latency, throughput and cost.
• Maintain CI/CD pipelines via GitHub and Azure DevOps.
• Automate embedding generation and knowledge base syncing.

Skills

Azure cloud

OpenSearch / vector DB

Terraform

Containerisation

Microservices

API design

Observability (OpenTelemetry)

Production infra ownership

AI platform experience

Tools

GitHub

Azure DevOps

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Join a high growth international SaaS business as an AI Platform Engineer, where you will design, build, and operate the AI platform that underpins our clinets conversational assistant and wider AI initiatives.

You will take responsibility for the runtime, infrastructure, and operational foundations underpinning our RAG pipelines, LLM orchestration, and vector search, built across Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Foundry. Where prototypes and proof-of-concepts exist, you will be the one turning them into resilient, production-ready services, working alongside AI Engineering, DevOps, and Info-Sec to get them there.

What You'll Do

• Build and extend a scalable AI platform via Microsoft Foundry.


• Own and optimise Foundry solutions for accuracy, scale, and latency.


• Harden the production RAG pipeline, covering inference, retrieval, and ingestion.


• Scale vector database and embedding pipelines.


• Build end-to-end observability across latency, throughput, cost, and system health.


• Strengthen resilience through fault-tolerance, caching, and autoscaling.


• Maintain CI/CD pipelines through GitHub and Azure DevOps.


• Automate embedding generation and knowledge base synchronisation.


• Embed secure-by-design principles, including IAM, encryption, and safe data flows.


• Mature governance practices, including versioning, audit logging, and compliance.

What You'll Bring

• Proven enterprise delivery on Microsoft Azure.


• Azure Data Factory experience for ETL workflows.


• Familiarity with vector databases or search engines such as OpenSearch.


• Experience with containerisation and Terraform.


• Solid grasp of microservices, API design, and cloud-native architecture.


• Observability tooling experience, such as OpenTelemetry, is a plus.


• Background in platform or infrastructure engineering within production environments.


• Track record owning cloud platforms with accountability for reliability and scale.


• Experience with production AI-enabled platforms is an advantage.


• Autonomous, ownership-driven approach with a strong focus on reliability.

This is a progressive career development opportunity to own the infrastructure behind cutting-edge AI products, working at the intersection of platform engineering and applied AI. You will bring genuine technical ownership and autonomy, supported by a world-class leadership team with a clear and ambitious AI roadmap.