Principal AI Engineer

Change Digital – Digital & Tech Recruitment; City of Edinburgh; À distance; GBP 75 000 - 125 000; Plein temps

Résumé du poste

Change Digital is partnering with a global technology organisation to recruit a Principal AI Engineer. You will shape the AI strategy, own architecture, and deliver production-grade AI capabilities while remaining hands-on with .NET Core and React.

This remote-first, UK-based permanent role offers up to £125K plus benefits. You will mentor engineers, drive AI adoption across the SDLC, and influence governance, observability and security across enterprise software.

Qualifications

• Senior software engineer with Principal/Lead/Staff experience.
• Strong hands-on with .NET Core/C# and React/TypeScript.
• Proven production AI solution delivery experience.
• Deep knowledge of LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG and agent systems.
• Experience with Azure OpenAI or equivalent cloud platforms.
• Familiar with Semantic Kernel and AI governance, observability and security.

Responsabilités

• Own the architecture and technical direction for AI capabilities.
• Design and deliver AI-powered enterprise features from prototype to production.
• Remain hands-on with .NET Core (C#) and React (TypeScript).
• Drive AI adoption across the SDLC, including tooling and governance.
• Build trustworthy AI with evaluation frameworks and guardrails.
• Lead technical discussions across engineering, product, security and architecture.
• Mentor senior engineers through reviews and knowledge sharing.
• Enhance CI/CD and AI Ops, including model/prompt versioning and monitoring.
• Help shape long-term AI roadmap and build-vs-buy decisions.

Connaissances

.NET/C#

React/TypeScript

AI/LLMs

Azure OpenAI

RAG/Agent systems

Semantic Kernel

Entity Framework

Azure SQL

CI/CD

Azure DevOps

Git

Security & privacy

Docker/Linux

OAuth/SSO

Observability

Architecture leadership

Outils

Git

CI/CD tooling

Azure DevOps

Description du poste

Principal AI Engineer – AI / .NET Core / React - Salary up to £125K plus benefits

Remote-first | UK | Permanent

Change Digital are exclusively supporting this exciting opportunity to recruit a Principal AI Engineers for a global technology organisation developing market-leading enterprise software across Legal, Risk, Compliance and HR.

This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role where you will shape the AI technical direction, design and deliver production-grade AI capabilities, and help drive the adoption of AI across the software development lifecycle.

The Role:

As Principal AI Engineer, you will:

• Own the architecture and technical direction for AI capabilities, including LLMs, agents, RAG, model management and evaluation.
• Design and deliver AI-powered enterprise features from prototype through to production.
• Remain hands-on with .NET Core (C#) and React (TypeScript) development.
• Drive the adoption of AI across the SDLC, including coding assistants, agentic development, testing and code review.
• Build trustworthy AI through evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability and governance.
• Lead technical and architectural discussions across engineering, product, security and architecture teams.
• Mentor and develop senior engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing and knowledge sharing.
• Enhance CI/CD and AI Ops capabilities, including model/prompt versioning, automated evaluation and monitoring.
• Help shape the long-term AI roadmap and make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions.

What We’re Looking For:

• Professional software development experience, including Principal, Lead or Staff-level responsibility.
• Strong hands-on experience with .NET Core / C# and React / TypeScript.
• Proven experience designing and delivering production AI solutions.
• Strong knowledge of LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, MCP and agentic/tool-calling systems.
• Experience with Azure OpenAI / Azure AI Foundry or equivalent cloud AI platforms.
• Experience with AI orchestration frameworks such as Semantic Kernel.
• Experience with Entity Framework and Azure SQL / SQL Server.
• Understanding of AI evaluation, benchmarking and improving AI system quality.
• Strong awareness of AI security, including prompt injection, data privacy and secure handling of sensitive information.
• Experience with Git, CI/CD and Azure DevOps or similar platforms.
• Strong technical leadership, mentoring and architecture experience.

Experience with areas such as:

• SLMs, fine-tuning, CAG and vector databases.
• AI observability and multi-agent systems.
• AI/ML and LLMOps pipelines.
• Docker, Linux and distributed caching such as Redis.
• OAuth, SSO and enterprise authentication.
• Infrastructure-as-code and automation.
• Enterprise SaaS or regulated environments such as LegalTech or FinTech.
• Applying AI to document, contract or natural-language workloads.

Why This Opportunity?

This is an excellent opportunity for a senior AI engineer/architect who wants to have genuine influence over how AI is designed, built and adopted at enterprise scale.

You will have the opportunity to shape AI strategy from architecture through to production, while remaining hands-on with modern AI technologies and software engineering.