Principal AI Engineer - London

Oliver Bernard; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A specialist data & AI consultancy in Central London is seeking an experienced professional to lead the design and build of production-grade systems using LLMs. The role involves working across various AI architectures and translating business problems into effective technical solutions. Strong programming skills, particularly in Python, and cloud deployment experience are essential. The position offers a hybrid work model with 3 days onsite and 2 days working from home.

Qualifications

• Proven experience building applications with LLM APIs.
• Hands-on experience implementing RAG architectures and vector databases.
• Strong programming skills in Python for building APIs.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and build of production-grade systems using LLMs.
• Work across RAG pipelines, vector databases, and agentic workflows.
• Liaise with stakeholders to translate business problems into technical solutions.

Skills

Building applications with LLM APIs

Implementing RAG architectures

Strong programming skills (Python)

Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)

Job description

3 days onsite, 2 days WFH - Central London

We're supporting a specialist data & AI consultancy operating at the forefront of applied AI, partnering closely with global leading AI labs.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and build production-grade systems using LLMs
• Working across RAG pipelines, vector databases, and agentic workflows
• Take AI from concept to real-world impact across industries like financial services, energy, and healthcare
• Liaise with stakeholders internally and externally to understand business problems and translate into technical solutions

Requirements:

• Proven experience building applications with LLM APIs, with a strong understanding of their real-world capabilities, limitations, and failure modes
• Hands-on experience implementing RAG architectures, vector databases, knowledge graphs, and effective prompt/context engineering
• Experience designing and developing multi-step LLM workflows and agent-based systems
• Strong programming skills (Python preferred) with experience building production-grade APIs and services
• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and deploying systems into production

3 days onsite, 2 days WFH - Central London