Senior AI Platform Engineer - Production-Grade Backend

Hackajob Ltd; Leeds; On-site; GBP 61,000 - 101,000; Full time

Job summary

Hackajob Ltd in Leeds seeks a senior AI Platform Engineer to design, code, and lead delivery of scalable AI systems powering AI-powered products. You will contribute production code, guide technical direction, and partner across product, data science, and engineering teams.

You will mentor engineers, implement MLOps practices, and help shape reusable AI platforms while ensuring reliability, security, and cost efficiency in large-scale deployments.

Qualifications

• 8 years of experience in software engineering with backend systems and cloud-native services.
• Expert-level coding in Python, TypeScript, Go, or similar with production code contributions.
• Hands-on enterprise AI experience with LLMs, AI agents, retrieval‑augmented generation, and model optimization.
• Ability to balance performance, scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, and cost.
• Expert knowledge of AWS, GCP, or Azure with production Docker/Kubernetes usage.
• Experience with APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, data pipelines, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, vector DBs.
• Mentoring engineers through design reviews, code reviews, debugging, and hands-on problem solving.
• Deep expertise in AI and leading innovation initiatives; governance and responsible AI.
• Experience using AI tools to drive innovation and impact.
• Leadership in managing AI risks and governance across the organization.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in CS, SWE, AI, or related field or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Design, code, and lead delivery of scalable AI platforms and intelligent applications.
• Act as a hands-on technical leader, designing, coding, reviewing, debugging production AI systems.
• Design and build scalable backend services, APIs, data pipelines, and inference pipelines at enterprise scale.
• Implement advanced LLM applications using retrieval-augmented generation, prompting, evaluation frameworks, model optimisation, agentic workflows, and tool integration.
• Make key technical decisions while ensuring maintainability, performance, reliability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Establish engineering best practices through hands-on contribution, code reviews, testing, observability, and deployment.
• Champion MLOps practices including model lifecycle management, evaluation, and deployment pipelines.
• Partner with product managers, data scientists, ML engineers, and business stakeholders to translate priorities into solutions.
• Build reusable frameworks, libraries, tooling, and platform components to accelerate AI development.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies through prototypes and production-readiness assessments; guide teams on patterns and trade-offs.
• Mentor engineers through coaching, pairing, reviews, and example-setting as a senior contributor.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Go

AI applications

Cloud platforms

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher in CS/SWE/AI or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Redis

Vector databases

Job description

Hackajob Ltd in Leeds seeks a senior AI Platform Engineer to design, code, and lead delivery of scalable AI systems powering AI-powered products. You will contribute production code, guide technical direction, and partner across product, data science, and engineering teams.

You will mentor engineers, implement MLOps practices, and help shape reusable AI platforms while ensuring reliability, security, and cost efficiency in large-scale deployments.