Lead AI Engineer – Kainos
Join Kainos and Shape the Future. Kainos is recognized as one of the UK’s leading AI and data businesses, with a decade-long track record of delivering production‑grade AI solutions across government, healthcare, defence, and commercial sectors. We are at the forefront of AI innovation, trusted by Microsoft, AWS, and others to deliver advanced AI and data solutions at citizen scale.
Job Profile Description
Kainos’ 150‑strong AI and Data Practice brings together deep expertise in machine learning, generative AI, agentic AI, and data. We are pioneers in responsible AI, having authored the UK government’s AI Cyber Security Code of Practice implementation guide and we partner with leading organisations to ensure AI is deployed ethically, securely, and with measurable business value.
Primary Purpose of the Role & Responsibilities
As a Lead AI Engineer you will architect, design, and deliver advanced AI solutions leveraging state‑of‑the‑art machine learning, generative and agentic AI technologies. Your responsibilities include:
* Driving the adoption of modern AI frameworks, AIOps best practices and scalable cloud‑native architectures.
* Providing hands‑on technical leadership, collaborating with customers to translate business challenges into trustworthy AI solutions, and ensuring responsible AI practices throughout.
* Mentoring a small team, coaching staff, managing employee performance and assisting in their career development.
* Leading client projects, establishing requirements in non‑technical language and delivering solutions that meet business goals.
Minimum (Essential) Requirements
* A minimum of a 2.1 degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, Statistics or a similar quantitative field.
* Demonstrable experience of deploying modern AI/ML solutions into production, including prompt engineering, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), model evaluation and monitoring using metrics such as precision, recall, NDCG and drift detection.
* Strong Python skills with grounding in software engineering best practices (CI/CD, testing, code reviews, etc.).
* Experience developing solutions at scale on cloud platforms (Azure & AWS), containerisation and orchestration tools such as Kubernetes and Docker.
* Expertise in data engineering for AI: handling large‑scale, unstructured, and multimodal data.
* Understanding of responsible AI principles, model interpretability and ethical considerations.
* Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to lead client projects and establish requirements in non‑technical language.
* Experience managing, coaching and developing junior members of a team and wider community.
Desirable
* Experience with modern deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), fine‑tuning or distillation of LLMs (e.g., GPT, Llama, Claude, Gemini), machine learning libraries (e.g., scikit‑learn, XGBoost).
* Experience with data storage for AI, vector databases, semantic search and knowledge graphs.
* Contributions to open‑source AI projects or research publications.
* Familiarity with AI security, privacy and compliance standards (e.g., ISO42001).
Embracing Our Differences
At Kainos we believe in the power of diversity, equity and inclusion. We are committed to building a team that is as diverse as the world we live in, where everyone is valued, respected and given an equal chance to thrive. We actively seek out talented people from all backgrounds, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, disability or any other characteristic that makes them who they are.
Equal Opportunity Employer
Kainos is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.
#J-18808-Ljbffr