Location: bp Sunbury-On-Thames, England, United Kingdom.
Principal AI Engineer – bp
We’re looking for a Principal AI Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with the ability to set direction, influence stakeholders, and shape the future of AI engineering across the enterprise. Our AI Acceleration organisation is building high-impact AI‑powered applications that deliver measurable business value at speed. As a Principal AI Engineer, you will serve as both a hands‑on technical leader and a strategic partner driving architectural choices, aligning with business and technology stakeholders, and ensuring that our AI systems are secure, reliable, and scalable.
Job Responsibilities
* Set Technical Direction: Define the long‑term technical strategy for AI engineering across the enterprise, ensuring alignment with organizational priorities and technology roadmaps.
* Architect for Scale: Drive architectural decisions for platforms and applications that leverage LLMs, retrieval‑augmented generation, AI agents, and unstructured data processing at enterprise scale.
* Influence & Align: Partner with senior engineering leaders, product managers, business stakeholders, and governance teams to align AI initiatives with business value, compliance, and responsible AI practices.
* Cross‑Org Leadership: Lead multi‑team initiatives, ensuring delivery of AI platforms and applications that are reusable, discoverable, and secure.
* Raise the Bar: Mentor senior and staff engineers, fostering technical excellence, operational rigor, and a culture of innovation and reuse.
* Future‑Proof AI: Evaluate emerging AI frameworks, protocols, and ecosystems, identifying opportunities to standardise, reduce duplication, and avoid vendor lock‑in.
* Operational Excellence: Establish engineering standards, metrics, and best practices for deploying and operating AI systems reliably in production.
* Thought Leadership: Represent AI engineering in internal and external forums, shaping industry perspective and ensuring bp remains a leader in practical AI adoption.
About You
* 12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of designing and delivering complex, production‑grade systems.
* Demonstrated experience leading cross‑functional engineering initiatives at scale, with ability to influence without direct authority.
* Expertise in modern software architecture, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
* Deep hands‑on experience integrating AI/ML systems into production environments, including LLMs, RAG, vector search, and AI agents.
* Strong ability to communicate technical strategy to executives, engineers, and business partners alike.
* Proven ability to set and enforce engineering standards for quality, security, and operational reliability.
* Experience mentoring senior engineers and shaping the growth of engineering organisations.
Preferred
* Experience defining enterprise‑level AI architectures, platforms, or internal developer tools.
* Familiarity with AI orchestration frameworks (LlamaIndex, LangChain, Crew AI, AutoGen, etc.) and best practices for agentic systems.
* Track record of contributions to open‑source AI/ML communities or internal platform accelerators.
* Background working in environments requiring compliance, security, and governance for AI applications.
* Exposure to both traditional ML and modern GenAI systems, with ability to evaluate trade‑offs and guide adoption.
Why join us?
At bp, we provide an excellent working environment, an inclusive culture, and a great work‑life balance. Tremendous learning and development opportunities are available to craft a career path, plus comprehensive health, medical, and life insurance, and other benefits.
We support our people to learn and grow in a diverse and exciting environment. We believe that our team is strengthened by diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment in which everyone is respected and treated fairly. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform crucial job functions, and receive other benefits and privileges of employment.
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