Senior AI Engineer — Productivity & Tooling (Hybrid)

SRG; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus

Hybrid work in Manchester

Job summary

SRG in Manchester is hiring a Lead AI Engineer for Developer Productivity to drive AI-enabled engineering tooling and workflows in real codebases.

The role is hands-on and requires building with LLM APIs, observability, CI/CD, and Git-based integrations, with a pragmatic, evidence-driven mindset.

The position is permanent, hybrid (2 days in-office), offering a salary of £100,000–£110,000 plus a bonus and benefits.

Qualifications

• Strong professional software engineering experience, including building and operating production software.
• Excellent programming and software design skills, with a solid grasp of testing, CI/CD and code review.
• Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs, including tool calling and agentic workflows.
• Day-to-day use of AI coding tools and agents on real codebases, with an evidence-based view of where they help and where they hurt.
• A practical understanding of how LLMs and agents fail: plausible but wrong code, fixes that mask symptoms, tests gamed to pass, context limits and cost growth.
• Experience integrating with Git platforms, CI/CD, issue trackers and observability tooling.
• Experience designing evaluations for AI outputs, or comparable experimental rigour.
• Python (or similar) and SQL for preparing code, documents and tickets for retrieval.
• Credibility with engineers and the ability to influence without line authority, including winning over sceptics.
• Helpful: Bitbucket, Jenkins/Harness, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, FastAPI, DORA-style measurement, RAG and vector search, self-hosted open-weight models, or a regulated environment such as gambling or financial services

Responsibilities

• Lead the hands-on work of building tooling and workflows to integrate AI into real codebases.
• Measure results with evidence-based evaluations and observable metrics to guide decisions.

Skills

Software engineering

LLM APIs

Python

SQL

CI/CD

Code reviews

Evidence-based evaluation

Influencing without authority

Observability

Retrieval augmented generation

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Git platforms

Jenkins/Harness

FastAPI

Vector search

Self-hosted models

Job description

SRG in Manchester is hiring a Lead AI Engineer for Developer Productivity to drive AI-enabled engineering tooling and workflows in real codebases.

The role is hands-on and requires building with LLM APIs, observability, CI/CD, and Git-based integrations, with a pragmatic, evidence-driven mindset.

The position is permanent, hybrid (2 days in-office), offering a salary of £100,000–£110,000 plus a bonus and benefits.