Principal AI Engineer

Job Title:
Principal AI Engineer

Location: UK Remote

Contract:
Outside IR35

Duration: 6 months

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.

• Lead the architecture and implementation of a production‑ready AI platform with AWS technologies including Lambda, Bedrock Knowledge Bases, and Open Search.
• 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.

• Extensive experience as an AI Engineer, AI Architect, or equivalent role.
• Strong hands‑on experience with AWS services including Lambda, API Gateway, Bedrock, Open Search, 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.