Lead AI Engineer — Production-Grade Agentic AI

AKQA; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid in-office days

Career growth

Equal opportunity employer

Job summary

AKQA in London is seeking a Lead / Principal AI Engineer to design, build and deliver production-grade AI systems and agentic workflows for cutting-edge digital experiences. You’ll lead architecture, work with clients and cross-functional teams, and ensure scalable, secure, and cost-aware implementations using cloud platforms.

This hands-on role blends deep engineering with leadership, emphasizing robust testing, observability and practical trade-offs to turn ambitious ideas into reliable

Qualifications

• Architect, develop and deploy production-ready AI systems, including agentic workflows and RAG.
• Lead the technical design of AI-powered products ensuring scalability, security and maintainability.
• Design and integrate APIs and MCP interfaces for enterprise systems and external services.

Responsibilities

• Develop compound AI architectures combining LLMs with specialized models and deterministic workflows.
• Build evaluation, testing, guardrails and observability for model behaviour and performance.
• Collaborate with frontend, product and engineering teams to deliver AI capabilities in web apps and platforms.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Python

TypeScript/Node.js

LLM architectures

Agentic workflows

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Tools

LangGraph

LangSmith

OpenTelemetry

AutoGen

Vercel AI SDK

Job description

AKQA in London is seeking a Lead / Principal AI Engineer to design, build and deliver production-grade AI systems and agentic workflows for cutting-edge digital experiences. You’ll lead architecture, work with clients and cross-functional teams, and ensure scalable, secure, and cost-aware implementations using cloud platforms.

This hands-on role blends deep engineering with leadership, emphasizing robust testing, observability and practical trade-offs to turn ambitious ideas into reliable