Lead AI Engineer

Higher - AI recruitment; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 72,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days holiday + bank holidays

Pension scheme

Life cover at 4x salary

Health and dental insurance options

Learning and development budget

Work abroad days

Cycle to work

Job summary

Higher is partnering with a London-based enterprise AI company to hire 2 Lead AI Engineers. You will embed directly with enterprise clients, tackle their most complex workflows, and architect autonomous, agentic AI systems that operate end-to-end, with strong production-grade delivery.

The role is forward-deployed and client-facing, requiring deep technical capability and business maturity. The team is 45 people, with nearly 20% PhDs, and the West London office welcomes you 1-2 days per week.

Qualifications

• 5+ years hands-on experience building and deploying production-grade AI systems.
• Led complex, client-facing technical engagements.
• Strong system design and architecture skills for scalable AI solutions.
• Experience setting technical direction and delivering measurable outcomes.
• Solid understanding of evaluation, reliability and performance in production AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Embed directly with enterprise clients to untangle their most complex workflows and architect agentic systems that automate them.
• Own delivery end-to-end from architecture through production in a forward-deployed, client-facing role.
• Collaborate with a 45-person team and operate from the West London office 1–2 times per week.

Skills

LLMs

RAG pipelines

agentic workflows

Client-facing delivery

System design

Technical leadership

Production reliability

Python

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Orchestration tooling

Job description

Higher is working with one of the most technically serious enterprise AI companies in London to hire 2 Lead AI Engineers. You should know about them.

Their clients include Johnson & Johnson, Cisco and Syneos Health. Their investors include the CEO of Revolut. And they're solving one of the hardest problems in enterprise software today.

THE PROBLEM THEY ARE SOLVING

Most AI in the enterprise is cosmetic. Dashboards. Copilots. Tools that assist, but don't act.

This company is building something different: Digital Workers, autonomous AI systems that execute complex knowledge workflows end to end, with human-level reliability. Founded nearly 10 years ago, with over $50m in funding from some of the UK's most prominent VCs, they've built a platform that actually runs in production at global scale.

THE ROLE

As Lead AI Engineer, you will embed directly with enterprise clients, untangle their most complex operational workflows, and architect the agentic systems that automate them. This is a forward-deployed, client-facing role that demands both deep technical capability and the maturity to operate at the business level. You will own delivery end to end, from architecture through to production.

The team is 45 people, nearly 20% with PhDs. They value intellectual rigour, ownership, and a genuine drive to win. They come together at their West London office 1-2 times per week.

WHAT YOU BRING

• 5+ years hands-on experience building and deploying production-grade AI systems using LLMs, RAG pipelines, MCPs and agentic workflows
• A track record of leading complex, client-facing technical engagements
• Strong system design and architecture skills, with the ability to turn ambiguous business problems into scalable AI solutions
• Experience setting technical direction and driving delivery to measurable outcomes
• Solid understanding of evaluation, reliability and performance in production AI systems

Tech stack: Python, modern LLM frameworks, orchestration tooling, and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP or Azure).

WHAT'S ON OFFER

• Up to £120,000 base salary + high-value share options
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, with carry-over and sell options
• Pension scheme, life cover at 4x salary
• Health and dental insurance optionsLearning and development budget, work abroad days
• Cycle to work, tech purchases scheme

***THIS COMPANY IS NOT OFFERING SPONSORSHIP TO FOREIGN CANDIDATES. IF YOU REQUIRE SPONSORSHIP TO LIVE AND WORK IN THE UK, PLEASE DO NOT APPLY***