Senior AI Engineer | £700/day Outside IR35 | 6-Month Contract
Industry: Technology / Capital Markets
Location: London - 3 days in office
Job Type: Contract
Our client, a forward-thinking technology organisation, is seeking a Senior AI Engineer to join a team building production-grade AI systems powered by large language models (LLMs).
You will work closely with software engineers and product stakeholders to design, develop, and deploy scalable AI applications, focusing on multi-agent orchestration, intelligent tool integration, and reliable production workflows.
Responsibilities
* Design and implement LLM-powered AI systems, including RAG pipelines, vector/knowledge databases, and agentic frameworks.
* Build and maintain production-grade AI applications with clean code, APIs, data pipelines, and robust error handling.
* Develop and maintain evaluation frameworks to measure and monitor system performance, accuracy, and reliability.
* Implement feedback loops and observability to continuously improve system performance.
* Craft and optimise prompts across different model providers for latency, cost, and output quality.
* Collaborate with developers, stakeholders, and cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, reliable AI solutions.
* Provide day-to-day support and troubleshooting for deployed AI systems.
Required Skills
* Hands-on experience with LLM APIs and deep understanding of capabilities, limitations, and failure modes.
* Practical experience implementing RAG architectures, vector/graph databases, knowledge graphs, and prompt engineering.
* Experience building multi-step LLM workflows and agentic systems using frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, Claude Agents SDK) or custom solutions.
* Strong Python (or other modern programming language) skills with production API/service development experience.
* Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), distributed systems, and CI/CD pipelines.
* Strong data manipulation skills (SQL, pandas) and experience evaluating AI system outputs.
* Ability to work with ambiguity and optimise non-deterministic systems while balancing latency, cost, and quality trade-offs.
Desirable Skills
* Experience with AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot).
* Knowledge of fine-tuning LLMs for domain-specific applications.
* Familiarity with real-time streaming, multimodal models, or search technologies (e.g., Elasticsearch).
* Experience with model observability tools (LangSmith, Weights & Biases) and cost optimisation strategies.
* Exposure to specialised industries (finance, healthcare, energy, legal, retail) and responsible AI practices.
* Experience with tool-calling agents, handoffs, and guardrails.