Senior Platform & AI Engineering Leader

Jobtailor; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

8th Light is seeking a senior platform engineering consultant to drive platform strategy for high-impact client engagements in London. You will oversee architecture decisions, guide AI/ML feature integrations, and mentor client and internal teams throughout multi-year projects.

The role requires deep consulting acumen, proven delivery of scalable platforms, and the ability to translate business needs into robust technical roadmaps.

Qualifications

• Typically 10+ years of repeated success across a variety of projects.
• Deep consulting acumen, technical expertise, and product thinking.
• Experience building and shipping production-grade platforms, reusable foundations, tools, infrastructure, and workflows.
• Experience taking AI and agentic systems from prototype to production.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure, authentication, and observability.
• Experience delivering high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, and client industries.
• Experience with multiple languages and frameworks, including Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Scala, R, and SQL.
• Experience experimenting with AI development tools.
• Experience building or integrating AI/ML features, including recommendation engines, NLP, computer vision, predictive analytics, RAG pipelines, and agents.
• Experience leading modernisation and replatforming efforts.
• Experience solving architecture-level problems involving scalability, security, reliability, performance, maintainability, and observability.
• Experience facilitating alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring teams and improving team practices.
• Strongly preferred: platform engineering, data engineering including Databricks, production agentic systems, RAG pipelines, vector search, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, n8n, DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code

Responsibilities

• Drive platform engineering work and lead platform strategy and delivery.
• Balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines.
• Advise clients on architecture, scalability, and platform evolution.
• Collaborate across the full ML lifecycle, from data ingestion and preprocessing through model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
• Surface new technical approaches and product solutions.
• Lead feedback conversations, retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives.
• Articulate and document outcomes and drive action items.
• Design and manage high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements.
• Coach client engineering teams and transfer knowledge.
• Influence client CTOs and executive decisions.
• Partner with account teams on planning, opportunity identification, stakeholder relationships, and pre-sales scope shaping.
• Identify, mitigate, and resolve blockers.
• Mentor internally, lead or design workshops, represent 8th Light in the tech community, and support hiring processes.
• Demonstrate leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform- or product-oriented development.
• Apply testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, secure engineering practices, and architectural patterns

Skills

Platform Engineering

AI/ML Feature Integration

Architecture Design

Client Engagement Leadership

Mentoring and Coaching

Tools

Databricks

LangChain

LlamaIndex

CrewAI

AutoGen

N8n

DevSecOps

DevOps

MLOps

Infrastructure as Code

Job description

8th Light is seeking a senior platform engineering consultant to drive platform strategy for high-impact client engagements in London. You will oversee architecture decisions, guide AI/ML feature integrations, and mentor client and internal teams throughout multi-year projects.

The role requires deep consulting acumen, proven delivery of scalable platforms, and the ability to translate business needs into robust technical roadmaps.