Lead GenAI Architect & Tech Coach

MOTORWAY; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity scheme

25 days holiday

Flexible working

Private medical insurance via BUPA

Life assurance

Pension scheme

Enhanced family leave

Employee Assistance Programme

EV leasing

Cycle to work

Nursery salary sacrifice

Volunteer day

Job summary

Motorway in London is seeking a Lead GenAI Engineer to set the technical standard for AI work across the function, and to build the hardest parts of it themselves. You'll own the architecture and standards for complex, product-facing GenAI work, with sign-off on systems that carry real risk, and you'll be the go-to for the toughest problems.

This is a player-coach role where your code sets the bar and you elevate others.

Qualifications

• You've set technical direction that other engineering teams actually adopted.
• Strong Python, and SQL you genuinely use.
• Deep, current expertise across the GenAI stack, including retrieval at scale, vector stores, agentic orchestration, multimodal work, evaluation infrastructure and fine-tuning where it earns its place.
• You're fluent in the layer underneath: MLOps tooling, deployment and cloud infrastructure (we run on AWS and GCP), and you can tell the difference between a choice that matters and one that doesn't.
• You design systems that survive contact with production, and you've been on the hook when they didn't.
• A strong point of view on evaluation, including the difference between evals that catch regressions and evals that provide comfort.
• Your direct contributions set a quality bar for the people around you.
• You explain hard technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders without either condescending or losing the substance.
• Self-awareness about where your knowledge runs out, and the instinct to bring in expertise early.

Responsibilities

• Set the architecture standard for complex GenAI work across the function, not by mandate but by building things others learn from and want to adopt.
• Hold sign-off on materially complex AI systems, catching architectural, safety and reliability problems before they reach production.
• Own the shared foundations that determine feature quality across teams: retrieval patterns, evaluation infrastructure, data pipelines, and the tooling that makes good practice the easy path.
• Build the hardest pieces of work directly, acting as the technical escalation point for the function's toughest problems.
• Design for systems that stay up and stay affordable, covering graceful degradation, fallback behaviour, and cost and latency at production scale.
• Develop the senior engineers around you by handing them harder problems, room to own decisions, and honest feedback.
• Shape how we hire and review, bringing a clear and defensible view of what good looks like.
• Bring specific, actionable industry insight into planning, explaining what a development means for our architecture rather than noting that the field moves fast.

Skills

Strong Python

SQL

GenAI stack expertise

MLOps tooling

AWS

GCP

Vector stores

Architectural leadership

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Python

AWS

GCP

Vector stores

Job description

Motorway in London is seeking a Lead GenAI Engineer to set the technical standard for AI work across the function, and to build the hardest parts of it themselves. You'll own the architecture and standards for complex, product-facing GenAI work, with sign-off on systems that carry real risk, and you'll be the go-to for the toughest problems.

This is a player-coach role where your code sets the bar and you elevate others.