Overview
Principal AI Engineer role at KPMG UK. The role leads AI engineering within the Audit Technology team, transforming advanced AI concepts into production-ready solutions to enhance audit quality, efficiency, and insights for auditors and clients.
Location
Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Gatwick, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Newcastle upon Tyne, Nottingham, Reading, South Coast - Southampton, Watford
Responsibilities
* Leadership & Mentorship: Lead a high-performing AI engineering team, provide hands-on technical direction, foster career growth, and cultivate a culture of engineering excellence and continuous improvement.
* Scalable AI Engineering: Design, develop, and deploy production-grade AI systems for audit applications, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability with strong software engineering principles, MLOps, and cloud-native development.
* End-to-End AI Solution Delivery: Oversee the full lifecycle of AI product engineering—from architectural design and prototyping to CI/CD-enabled deployment—using platforms and tools such as Azure ML, Databricks, MLflow, LangChain, and LangGraph. Emphasise automation, testing, and observability.
* Operational Excellence: Define reusable development patterns, enforce coding standards, and promote MLOps best practices for version control, performance, and maintainability.
* Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Partner with data scientists, product managers, platform engineers, and QA teams to align requirements, delivery timelines, and integration plans.
* AI Governance & Risk Management: Implement engineering controls for responsible AI, including model monitoring, explainability, security, and auditability; contribute to AI governance frameworks.
* Capability Building & Knowledge Sharing: Drive initiatives to enhance internal capabilities and empower the Audit Technology function to adopt AI innovations.
Requirements
* Bachelor (preferably Master or PhD) in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Statistics, Engineering, or related field—or equivalent professional experience.
* Strong knowledge of generative AI, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and related fields.
* Proven track record of designing, developing, and deploying AI systems in production.
* Proficient in Python and key ML libraries (e.g., PyTorch, PySpark, scikit-learn, Hugging Face Transformers).
* Hands-on experience with Azure ML, Databricks, MLflow, LangChain, LangGraph.
* Experience with modern engineering practices: Git, version control, unit testing, and containerisation.
* Familiarity with agile methodologies and tools like Jira and Confluence.
* Exceptional leadership and communication skills to convey complex concepts to diverse audiences.
* Advanced certifications in AI, machine learning, cloud computing, or data engineering are advantageous.
* Professional accounting qualification preferred but not required.
Why Audit at KPMG?
Audit is the largest practice in the UK. Our work provides independent insight, challenge and expertise, affecting investment decisions, public sector confidence, and economic growth. We aim to lead the future of the profession by building confidence and trust for business and society, and by delivering excellence and collaboration across UK and global audits.
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