Lead AI Engineer

Overview

Are you passionate about Artificial Intelligence and ready to lead from the front? We’re looking for a Lead AI Engineer to join our AI and Data Practice at Sopra Steria. This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll combine technical expertise with line management responsibilities, guiding and developing a talented team while shaping the future of AI solutions. You’ll work on cutting-edge projects, applying innovative AI technologies to solve complex business challenges.

Alongside this, you’ll mentor and coach engineers, fostering a collaborative, high-performing environment. We offer great career progression opportunities, flexible benefits, and the ability to work from anywhere in the UK, with only occasional travel for client or team meetings.

• Leading the delivery of advanced AI and agent-based solutions.
• Managing and developing a team of engineers, providing hands-on line management and support.
• Coaching and mentoring junior engineers, promoting best practice and growth.
• Communicating complex AI concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Managing project delivery to ensure outcomes are on time, within budget and to quality standards.
• Applying MLOps practices to address risk and technical debt.
• Staying up to date with advancements in AI, agent architectures and emerging best practices.

• Proven experience in line management and team leadership within a technical environment.
• Expertise in AI and Machine Learning, including agent-based AI, RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), multi-agent systems and conversational agents.
• Strong programming skills in Python, Java or .NET.
• Experience with GenAI and LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, OpenAI), including prompt engineering, fine tuning and advanced search.
• Familiarity with AI agent frameworks (e.g. Autogen AI) and digital assistant solutions such as Microsoft Copilot.
• Knowledge of cloud-native engineering techniques for scalable AI deployment.

If you’re interested but not sure if your skills match every requirement, please apply – we’d love to hear from you!

Employment Type: Full-time, Permanent

Location: UK Wide (occasional travel for client or team meetings)

Security Clearance Level: SC Eligible

Salary: Up to £90,000

Internal Recruiter: Annecia

Benefits
: £5,400 car allowance, 25 days annual leave with the option to buy additional days, private medical, life assurance, pension, and a generous flexible benefits fund.

We believe flexibility at work promotes balance and productivity. If you need to work flexibly, talk to us – we’re happy to explore what’s possible.

With a long history of delivering transformation, we ve developed a market-leading partnership ecosystem to provide business services of the future and shape valuable, positive outcomes for communities. We empower our clients by providing innovative solutions and commercial models that help them meet their business needs, drive operational efficiencies, and deliver impactful value creation. We remain committed to values of excellence, empathy and respect to produce transformative outcomes in business processing – creating value for all.

We embrace difference as a source of creativity, innovation and competitive advantage and are striving to become a more diverse organisation. We welcome applications from people with a diverse variety of backgrounds and identities. We are committed to equality of opportunity for all and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation or marital status.

We have partnered with Vercida, the UK s largest diversity and inclusion focused careers site, where all our vacancies are available in an accessible format. If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, to enable you to perform to the best of your ability, please let us know when completing your application. We participate in the Disability Confident scheme and are committed to offering an interview to any candidate with a disability, who meets the minimum criteria for the role.

If you believe this could apply to you, please let us know when completing your application.