Artificial Intelligence Specialist

Skillfinder International; Southampton; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A premier technology company is seeking a Senior AI Architect for a contract role in Southampton, England. This position involves leading the design and development of AI applications with state-of-the-art LLMs and driving autonomous AI workflows on the Azure cloud. Candidates should have over 8 years in software architecture and significant AI/ML experience. This is an opportunity to shape the architectural standards across a major programme, ensuring production-grade AI systems are built at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software architecture or enterprise solutions.
• 3+ years of hands-on AI/ML development experience.
• Strong expertise in Azure cloud architecture.

Responsibilities

• Design & build AI applications using LLMs.
• Integrate agentic AI frameworks for autonomous workflows.
• Lead architecture for scalable AI/ML service deployment.
• Deliver Azure-based solutions with secure backend and frontend.
• Collaborate on CI/CD pipelines for AI workloads.
• Provide technical leadership in AI strategy.

Skills

Software architecture

AI/ML development

Azure cloud architecture

Large language models

Frontend development (React, Angular, Vue)

Data science techniques

Job description

Senior AI Architect – Contract Role Driving Autonomous AI on Azure

Are you an AI specialist with a passion for large language models, cutting-edge agentic frameworks, and cloud-native architecture? Join a major programme shaping the future of intelligent systems within an enterprise environment.

We’re hiring a Senior AI Architect for an extendable contract role (inside IR35). You’ll lead the design and development of AI applications using state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g. OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral), advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and frameworks like LangGraph, CrewAI, and AutoGen.

This is a high-impact opportunity to set architectural standards, collaborate across engineering and DevOps teams, and build production-grade AI systems at scale—particularly across the Azure cloud ecosystem.

What you’ll do

• Design & build AI-driven applications using LLMs for summarisation, generation, Q&A, and reasoning.
• Integrate agentic AI frameworks to create autonomous / semi-autonomous workflows.
• Lead architecture for scalable AI / ML service deployment, model orchestration, and monitoring.
• Deliver full-stack Azure-based solutions with secure backend, frontend, and data services.
• Collaborate with DevOps / MLOps teams to streamline CI / CD pipelines for AI workloads.
• Provide technical leadership and shape wider AI strategy across the programme.

Essential skills

• 8+ years in software architecture / enterprise solutions.
• 3+ years of hands-on AI / ML development experience.
• Strong Azure cloud architecture expertise.
• Proficiency with LLMs, RAG, agent-based systems, and data science techniques.
• Frontend experience (React, Angular or Vue) integrated with backend AI services.

Nice to have

• Experience guiding multidisciplinary teams in a regulated or enterprise setting.