Senior Applied AI Engineer

Deerfoot Recruitment Solutions; East Hagbourne; Hybride; GBP 129 000 - 166 000; Plein temps

Résumé du poste

Deerfoot Recruitment Solutions is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer on a contract basis in Oxfordshire. The role focuses on ownership of agentic AI systems, ensuring production-grade reliability and performance across cloud and on‑prem environments.

You will design and deploy end‑to‑end AI pipelines, integrate LangGraph/LangChain/Haystack, and set engineering standards while contributing to a rapidly scaling tech team. Hybrid work requiring 2 days on site per week.

Qualifications

• Proven track record building multi-agent AI systems in production.
• Strong Python and production-grade code.
• Experience deploying AI/ML systems to production.
• Familiar with secure deployment and cloud platforms.

Responsabilités

• Architecting and building multi‑agent AI systems end‑to‑end, combining frameworks such as LangGraph or Haystack where they add value with bespoke orchestration, state management and tool‑calling logic where a framework won’t cut it
• Writing production‑grade code with reliability, latency and graceful failure handling designed in from the start rather than bolted on afterwards
• Embedding LLMs and vision‑language models into live reasoning, search, summarisation and task‑execution workflows, backed by solid retrieval, memory and guardrail design
• Deploying across cloud and on‑premises environments, adapting your approach to each environment’s security and connectivity constraints
• Taking end‑to‑end ownership of production pipelines, from raw data ingestion through to live inference
• Building the monitoring, evaluation and guardrail tooling that shows how a system is actually performing in the field
• Setting technical standards for agentic AI within the team, establishing the patterns other engineers follow and leaving clear documentation behind

Connaissances

Python

Agentic AI

Software engineering

Docker

Git

AWS

LangGraph

LangChain

Haystack

Outils

LangGraph

LangChain

Haystack

Docker

AWS

Kubernetes

Description du poste

Senior Applied AI Engineer Contract

Outside IR35 £700 - £900 per day DOE

6 months + likely extension

Oxfordshire (hybrid - 2 days p/w on site)

Our client is a rapidly scaling UK deep-tech company delivering advanced agentic AI capability. This role sits in their AI team, working with a commercial customer in biotech and pharma. They are hiring a Senior Applied AI Engineer to take ownership of the agentic AI systems underpinning their platform, on a contract basis, with genuine influence over how those systems are architected and delivered.

This role suits an engineer who designs and ships systems rather than assembling pre-built components, someone who cares more about how a system performs once it's live and under pressure than how impressive it looks in a demo.

What You'll Be Doing

• Architecting and building multi‑agent AI systems end‑to‑end, combining frameworks such as LangGraph or Haystack where they add value with bespoke orchestration, state management and tool‑calling logic where a framework won’t cut it
• Writing production‑grade code with reliability, latency and graceful failure handling designed in from the start rather than bolted on afterwards
• Embedding LLMs and vision‑language models into live reasoning, search, summarisation and task‑execution workflows, backed by solid retrieval, memory and guardrail design
• Deploying across cloud and on‑premises environments, adapting your approach to each environment’s security and connectivity constraints
• Taking end‑to‑end ownership of production pipelines, from raw data ingestion through to live inference
• Building the monitoring, evaluation and guardrail tooling that shows how a system is actually performing in the field
• Setting technical standards for agentic AI within the team, establishing the patterns other engineers follow and leaving clear documentation behind

What We're Looking For

• Robust software engineering, including developing LLM‑powered or agentic systems, and a track record operating at senior/lead level
• Strong engineering fundamentals: code that's clean, tested and built to last, not just prototypes that work once
• Commercial track record building and owning multi‑agent or agentic AI systems in live production settings, as an engineer rather than an integrator
• Strong Python skills, comfortable working with LangGraph, LangChain, Haystack or similar, and equally comfortable dropping below the framework when that's the right call
• Real‑world experience deploying AI/ML systems into production, beyond notebooks and proof‑of‑concepts
• Confidence across inference performance, data pipeline design, state/memory handling, and tool or function calling
• Experience building retrieval and search over very large, multi‑modal datasets, including indexing and embedding at scale
• Comfortable with Docker, Git and cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS
• Understanding of secure deployment approaches, including on‑premises and sovereign cloud

Nice to Have

• Biotech, pharma or life sciences domain experience
• Multimodal reasoning experience
• Kubernetes experience (EKS or OpenShift)
• MLOps background: evaluation, monitoring, reproducibility
• Observability for agentic systems, covering drift, agent behaviour and performance
• Familiarity with agent‑to‑agent orchestration protocols or the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Awareness of secure‑by‑design frameworks (ISO 27001, NIST, OWASP)
• Open‑source AI/ML contributions

Why Apply

• Real technical ownership: shape the architecture, not just work through a backlog
• Work at the leading edge of agentic and generative AI, on systems people genuinely depend on
• Join a fast‑scaling business with a strong chance of the contract extending or evolving further
• Strong day rate reflecting seniority and scope

This is a contract engagement operating outside IR35, offered on an initial 6‑month term with a strong likelihood of extension.