Lead Agentic AI Engineer - Production Systems (Contract)

Deerfoot IT Resources Limited; East Hagbourne; Hybrid; GBP 129,000 - 166,000; Full time

Job summary

Deerfoot IT Resources Limited seeks a Senior Applied AI Engineer to own and deliver multi-agent AI systems on a contract basis outside IR35. The role is based in Oxfordshire with a hybrid pattern (2 days on site per week) and a day rate of £700-£900.

The project focuses on deploying robust AI capabilities in biotech/pharma contexts and requires leading-edge architectural ownership. You will architect end-to-end agentic AI systems, embed LLMs and multi-modal models, optimize performance, and

Qualifications

• Strong background in building production-grade AI systems.
• Experience shipping multi-agent or agentic AI in live environments.
• Proficient in Python and cloud-based deployment (AWS preferred).
• Hands-on with LLMs, retrieval, memory and guardrails.

Responsibilities

• Architect end-to-end multi-agent AI systems for live use.
• Write reliable production-grade code with performance and fault-tolerance.
• Embed LLM/vision-language models into live reasoning pipelines.
• Deploy across cloud and on-prem environments with security in mind.
• Own production pipelines from raw data to live inference.
• Build monitoring and guardrail tooling to measure real-world performance.
• Set engineering standards and create clear documentation.

Skills

Python

LLM deployment

Multi-agent systems

Production-grade software

System design

Data pipelines

Secure deployment

Inference performance

Tools

Docker

Git

AWS

Kubernetes

OpenShift

LangGraph

LangChain

Haystack

Job description

Deerfoot IT Resources Limited seeks a Senior Applied AI Engineer to own and deliver multi-agent AI systems on a contract basis outside IR35. The role is based in Oxfordshire with a hybrid pattern (2 days on site per week) and a day rate of £700-£900.

The project focuses on deploying robust AI capabilities in biotech/pharma contexts and requires leading-edge architectural ownership. You will architect end-to-end agentic AI systems, embed LLMs and multi-modal models, optimize performance, and