Lead AI & ML Engineer

Charlotte Tilbury; City of Westminster; Hybrid; GBP 75,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading beauty company in the UK seeks a Lead AI & ML Engineer to spearhead the adoption of AI across the business. You will lead a team that builds robust AI solutions, ensuring scalable and impactful integrations. The ideal candidate will have strong Python skills, experience with GCP AI platforms, and a proven track record in managing AI projects. You will collaborate with various stakeholders to enhance AI capabilities while maintaining compliance with privacy regulations. Join us to innovate in the beauty sector!

Benefits

Flexible hybrid working model

25 days holiday plus bank holidays

Inclusive parental leave policy

Pension and life assurance

Employee assistance programs

Dog-friendly workplace

Generous product discount

Qualifications

• Experience managing AI/ML teams and projects.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native AI/ML platforms.
• Proven capability in deploying and operating ML systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead the AI & ML Engineering team in adopting and implementing AI solutions.
• Design and build production-level ML systems and pipelines.
• Ensure compliance with privacy and security regulations.

Skills

Strong Python engineering skills

Experience with GCP Vertex AI

MLOps CI/CD knowledge

Understanding of security and privacy principles

Excellent communication skills

Ability to lead and manage teams

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

FastAPI

Terraform

Job description

The AI & ML Engineering team accelerates the adoption of AI across the business, championing innovation while ensuring our machine learning products are robust, scalable, and cost‑efficient. We enable teams to solve problems using existing AI tools where possible and build custom solutions when needed. Our remit spans AI enablement, agentic systems development, and "conventional" ML engineering for non‑GenAI applications e.g. recommender systems, forecasting models, and more. The Lead AI & ML Engineer leads this team. We’re looking for an individual who can own the standard & delivery of AI/ML across Charlotte Tilbury and contribute to the development & delivery of the company’s AI strategy. You will manage & coach a team of AI engineers and play a pivotal role in AI enablement across the company, educating and advising teams across the business on safe, scalable and impactful adoption of AI. You will be expected to balance hands‑on technical leadership with programme level enablement, ensuring we are using existing tools pragmatically, investing in new ones where needed, and building prototypes through to production‑ready systems where needed.

Responsibilities

• Partnering with stakeholders to scope problems and identify the right solution – whether leveraging existing AI tools or building custom workflows & solutions.
• Designing and implementing agentic systems using techniques spanning RAG, grounding, prompt engineering, and orchestration on a GCP‑first stack.
• Building and maintaining production ML pipelines and services for non‑GenAI use cases e.g. recommender systems, customer segmentation models, marketing optimisation modules, leveraging supervised, unsupervised and/or econometric modelling approaches.
• Developing APIs and microservices for AI/ML solutions, ensuring security, scalability, and observability.
• Implementing CI/CD for ML services, writing infrastructure as code, and monitoring for model/data drift and performance.
• Establishing robust guardrails for safe AI usage, including prompt security, practical evaluation frameworks, and compliance with privacy regulations.
• Driving and evangelising best practices, reusable templates, and documentation to scale AI/ML delivery across the business.
• Collaborating with data engineers, data scientists, front & back end engineers, product managers, legal & info‑sec colleagues to deliver impactful solutions end to end.
• Line management of AI/ML Engineers setting goals, developing skills, and mentoring for high performance.

Who you will work with

This role reports directly to the Director of AI & Data, and collaborates closely with the wider Data team – Data Science, Core Data Engineering, Analytics, Customer Insight – and the wider organisation, particularly Technology, Legal, and Information Security to onboard/develop & scale AI applications.

Qualifications

• Strong Python engineering skills: FastAPI, testing, typing and experience with cloud‑native development (GCP preferred).
• Hands‑on experience with GCP Vertex AI model endpoints, pipelines, embeddings, vector search or equivalent cloud‑native AI/ML platforms (e.g. AWS SageMaker, Azure ML) and agent orchestration frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LangGraph).
• Solid understanding of MLOps CI/CD, IaC Terraform, experiment tracking, model registry, and monitoring.
• Proven experience deploying and operating ML systems in production – batch and real‑time.
• Familiarity with RAG architectures, prompt engineering, and evaluation techniques.
• Strong grasp of security, privacy, and governance principles (IAM, secrets, PII handling).
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work with non‑technical stakeholders.
• Proven experience operating as a player‑coach, hands‑on engineering manager who both builds and leads.
• Demonstrable ability to weigh up build/buy/configure decisions in the LLM space.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering/related field, or demonstrable relevant experience.

Additional desirable skills

• Knowledge of vector databases and retrieval strategies.
• Experience with recommender systems and ranking models.
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation tools e.g., RAGAS, TruLens, LangSmith, Arize.
• Experience in e‑commerce or retail environments.

Benefits

• Be a part of this values‑driven, high‑growth, magical journey with an ultimate vision to empower everyone, everywhere to be the best version of themselves.
• We're a hybrid model with flexibility, allowing you to work how best suits you.
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays with an additional day to celebrate your birthday.
• Inclusive parental leave policy that supports all parents and carers throughout their parenting and caring journey.
• Financial security and planning with our pension and life assurance for all.
• Wellness and social benefits including Medicash, Employee Assist Programs and regular social connects with colleagues.
• Bring your furry friend to work with you on our allocated dog‑friendly days and spaces.
• And not to forget our generous product discount and gifting!

About Charlotte Tilbury Beauty

Founded by British makeup artist and beauty entrepreneur Charlotte Tilbury MBE in 2013, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty has revolutionised the face of the global beauty industry by de‑coding makeup applications for everyone, everywhere, with an easy‑to‑use, easy‑to‑choose, easy‑to‑gift range. Today, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty continues to break records across countries, channels, and categories and to scale at pace. Over the last 10 years, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty has experienced exceptional growth and is one of the most talked‑about brands in the beauty industry and beyond. It has become a global sensation across 50 markets and growing, with over 2,300 employees globally who are part of the Dream Team making the magic happen. Today, Charlotte Tilbury Beauty is a truly global business, delivering market‑leading growth, innovative retail and product launches fuelled by industry‑leading tech – all with an internal culture of embracing challenges, disruptive thinking, winning together, and sharing the magic. The energy behind the brand is infectious, and as we grow, we are always looking for extraordinary talent who want to be part of this success and help drive our limitless ambitions.

At Charlotte Tilbury Beauty, our mission is to empower everybody in the world to be the most beautiful version of themselves. We celebrate and support this by encouraging and hiring people with diverse backgrounds, cultures, voices, beliefs, and perspectives into our growing global workforce. By doing so, we better serve our communities, customers, employees – and the candidates that take part in our recruitment process. If you want to learn more about life at Charlotte Tilbury Beauty please follow our LinkedIn page!