Lead AI Engineer

Bally's Intralot; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Home office allowance

Wellness or Gym allowance

Flexi-block policy (work abroad up to

Job summary

Bally's Intralot is seeking a founding AI Engineering leader in the UK to drive the R&D agenda and deliver live AI features for personalisation, recommendation, search and agents. You will lead from the front, line-manage the team, and shape the technical direction across brands.

You will own production standards, ensure scalable, observable systems, and balance experimentation with disciplined engineering while collaborating with product and data teams.

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading AI/ML production systems.
• Strong leadership, mentoring and stakeholder management.
• Experience delivering AI features from R&D to production.

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical execution of the AI R&D agenda across personalisation, recommendation, search and agents.
• Lead one team spanning R&D and delivery; line-manage engineers and ship features to live product.
• Set production bar for AI features end-to-end with observability and reliability.

Skills

TypeScript

Python

AI production systems

Leadership

Mentoring

Cloud architectures

Tools

AWS

CI/CD

Observability

Infrastructure as Code

LLMOps

Job description

You'll lead a new AI Engineering function that runs in two halves under one team: R&D proves what's possible in personalisation, recommendation, search and agents; a delivery layer ships it into the live product for real players.

This is a founding leadership role. You'll build density around an established AI R&D nucleus, drive its technical execution, grow the engineers in it, and stay close enough to the work to lead from the front across the lobby and discovery experience and the content pipelines behind it: recommendation, contextual bandits, dynamic categorisation, advanced search, agents, and automatic content generation.

It's a hands-on leadership role: you own the technical bar and the how, line-manage and grow the team, and carry enough technical weight to make the hard calls and be trusted on them.

So, what will you be doing?

• Drive the technical execution of the AI R&D agenda: decide how problems get approached, which technical and architectural bets are worth making, and how capability gets proven across personalisation, recommendation, search and agents.
• Lead one team spanning R&D and delivery: line-manage, grow, and unblock the engineers, and be accountable for both proving capability and shipping it into the live product.
• Set the production bar and standards for AI features end to end — how experimental work crosses into hardened, observable, maintainable systems without losing its edge.
• Stay hands-on where it counts: lead from the front on the hard problems, pressure test the technical bets, and be credible in the code without owning delivery of every feature yourself.
• Own the path from validated prototype to live: real-time personalisation, recommendation, search and ranking against live traffic, within real latency budgets and reliability realities.
• Hold a high engineering bar on AWS and TypeScript — clean CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, testing, and LLMOps for running model-backed systems in production.
• Shape delivery against the roadmap with the VP, product managers, data analysts and Staff Engineers, and make the capability compound across brands rather than be rebuilt per brand.
• Work within Responsible Gambling and UKGC requirements, in a regulated, real money, real-time domain.

And what will you need?

• Significant commercial software engineering experience, including experience leading technical teams or engineering functions.
• Strong expertise in TypeScript and Python, with a proven track record of delivering AI, machine learning or data-driven solutions into production, including recommendation engines, intelligent search, ranking systems or LLM-powered applications.
• Extensive experience building and operating cloud-native applications on AWS, with strong knowledge of CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability and modern engineering practices.
• Experience delivering high-performance, real-time systems that operate reliably at scale with demanding latency requirements.
• Demonstrated experience leading the successful transition of AI solutions from research or proof of concept into robust, production-ready services.
• Experience establishing technical standards, driving engineering excellence and mentoring or developing engineers within high-performing teams.

Skills & Behaviours:

• A technical leader who enjoys building, mentoring and developing engineering teams while creating an environment where innovation can thrive.
• Able to balance experimentation with engineering discipline, making sound technical decisions that deliver long-term value.
• Confident leading technical discussions, influencing architecture and making complex decisions across multiple stakeholders.
• Passionate about building scalable, maintainable and observable AI systems using modern engineering best practices.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, data and leadership teams.
• Comfortable remaining hands-on with technology while providing strategic technical leadership and direction.

Company Benefits

• Health insurance.
• Home office allowance.
• Wellness or Gym allowance.
• Flexi-block policy allowing you to work abroad for up to four weeks a year.
• Annual Summer and Christmas parties.

Interview Process

• Hiring Manager interview – 30-minute Teams call with Hiring Manager
• Team interview – 1.5-hour interview covering technical and behavioural areas
• Take-home assessment – To be completed within 48–72 hours