Principal AI Engineer

Job Title: Principal AI Engineer
Location: UK Remote
Contract: Outside IR35
Duration: 6 months

Why Apply?
This is a high-impact, contract opportunity for a Principal AI Engineer to take the lead on designing and implementing an enterprise-grade AI platform. You will be working on a cutting-edge AI assistant product built on AWS technologies, providing the opportunity to shape architecture, enforce policy-driven development, and introduce best-in-class AI platform practices. This role offers exposure to modern LLM and RAG systems, cloud-native infrastructure, and the chance to influence the technical direction of an innovative AI product.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the architecture and implementation of a production-ready AI platform with AWS technologies including Lambda, Bedrock Knowledge Bases, and OpenSearch.
• Establish policy-driven development standards, guardrails, and vendor-neutral approaches across AI systems.
• Design and implement LLM gateway and multi-component orchestration patterns.
• Introduce comprehensive logging, monitoring, and audit trails for AI workloads, including S3-based data tracking.
• Define and enforce best practices for state management, prompt injection protection, deterministic vs agentic AI patterns, and execution environments.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to ensure scalable, secure, and maintainable AI solutions integrated into the broader SDLC.
• Optimise system performance, latency, and cost efficiency of AI-driven workflows.

Requirements:

• Extensive experience as an AI Engineer, AI Architect, or equivalent role.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS services including Lambda, API Gateway, Bedrock, OpenSearch, S3, ECS/Fargate, and Terraform/CDK.
• Proven experience with LLM platforms, RAG pipelines, and agentic AI or multi-agent architectures.
• Demonstrable track record in implementing AI governance, compliance, and policy-driven development practices.
• Skilled in system observability, monitoring, and logging for AI workloads.
• Proficient in Python, cloud-native development, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience collaborating across product, engineering, and data science teams to deliver scalable AI platforms.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

We are an equal opportunities employer and welcome applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.