Lead AI Engineer

Winston Fox; Greater London; On-site; GBP 450,000 - 550,000; Full time

Job summary

Winston Fox in London seeks a prolific Lead AI Engineer / Technical Lead to shape an enterprise-scale AI platform for a top UK hedge fund. This production-focused role requires world-class software engineering, architecture, and AI orchestration to advance LLMs, agent-based workflows, and autonomous pipelines in a production investment environment.

You will influence platform evolution, raise engineering standards, and drive measurable business value through cutting-edge AI capabilities.

Qualifications

• Proven track record building production AI platforms.
• Experience designing large-scale distributed AI systems with measurable impact.
• Deep expertise in LLMs, AI agents, retrieval systems and orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build enterprise-scale AI platforms and production applications.
• Design multi-agent systems, orchestration frameworks and reusable AI capabilities.
• Partner with teams to identify AI opportunities to improve research and decision-making.
• Provide technical leadership across complex initiatives and platform evolution.
• Improve shared AI platform, tooling and developer experience.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and productionise those with competitive advantage.
• Establish best practices for observability and production operations.

Skills

Large-scale systems design

LLMs / AI agents

Python

C#

Java

Go

GenAI architectures

Observability

Tools

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Claude Code

Aider

MLflow

Vector Databases

Docker

Kubernetes

Airflow

Dagster

DBT

Job description

We are looking to hire a prolific Lead AI Engineer / Technical Lead for an equally prolific Multi-agent AI Platform team (ranked in the UK top 10). We are looking for a World-Class Software Engineer/Architect and Thought-Leader to help this already successful team push the boundaries and drive the future vision of their AI Platform. The hiring budget for this position is naturally very significant to attract a top 1% calibre candidate (£500k+ comp). To clarify, this is not a Quant, Data Science, or Model Development role. This role builds the underlying systems and foundations that researchers use to develop their models. This is a technical leadership position, not a team leadership role.

We are not considering applications from candidates

Help define the future of AI in investment management.

This is an opportunity to join one of the world's most technologically advanced hedge funds as it builds the next generation of AI capabilities across its global investment platform.

The firm has invested heavily in AI, modern infrastructure and engineering excellence, and is now looking for an exceptional engineer to help push the boundaries of what is possible with LLMs, multi-agent systems, AI orchestration and autonomous workflows in a production investment environment.

You'll be expected to challenge conventional thinking, experiment with emerging technologies, and build production-grade platforms that deliver measurable business value.

The Role

• Architect and build enterprise-scale AI platforms, agentic workflows and production applications purpose-built for AI.
• Design and implement sophisticated multi-agent systems, orchestration frameworks and reusable AI capabilities.
• Partner with various teams to identify opportunities where AI can fundamentally improve research, analysis and decision-making.
• Provide technical leadership across complex technology initiatives, influencing architecture, engineering standards and platform evolution.
• Continuously improve the firm's shared AI platform, frameworks, tooling and developer experience.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and rapidly productionise those capable of creating genuine competitive advantage.
• Help establish best practices for observability and production operations.

We're looking for engineers who

• You have strong experience designing and building large-scale distributed production platforms for sophisticated multi-agent AI
• You can demonstrate that you have designed and built systems with measurable commercial impact.
• You will possess deep expertise and passion for LLMs, AI agents, retrieval systems, model orchestration and modern GenAI architectures.
• You enjoy and have a passion for solving extremely difficult engineering problems and continuously learning new technologies.
• You think like platform engineers, building reusable capabilities that enable others to innovate faster.
• You are demonstrably passionate about automation, engineering excellence and pushing technical boundaries.
• You can confidently influence senior engineers, technology leaders and business stakeholders
• If you have experience developing these sophisticated systems for another top hedge fund or proprietary trading firm then you would be highly desirable for this team
• Python, C#, Scala, Java and Go
• LangChain, LlamaIndex, Claude Code, Aider and emerging agentic AI frameworks
• MLflow and model evaluation tooling
• SQL, Pandas, Polars, Snowflake and Vector Databases
• Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and Flux
• Airflow, Dagster and DBT

We are only considering exceptional candidates with a proven track record of building sophisticated AI platforms.