Principal AI Engineer in Manchester

We’re 1st Central, a market-leading insurance company utilising smart data and technology at pace. Rapid growth has been based on giving our 1.4 million customers exactly what they want: great value insurance with an excellent service. And that’s the same for our colleagues too; we won Insurance Employer of the Year at the British Insurance Awards 2024 and our Glassdoor score is pretty mega too!

An exciting opportunity has arisen for a Principal AI Engineer to join us as a senior technical authority for AI and Generative AI, defining our long-term AI engineering strategy and leading the design of enterprise‑grade solutions that deliver safe, scalable and high‑impact AI across the business.

You’ll build secure, scalable multi‑provider AI platforms, leveraging third‑party capabilities where they add value that minimise vendor lock‑in and support rapid experimentation across Azure OpenAI and alternative LLM ecosystems. You’ll also shape the design of agentic AI systems, orchestration layers, and integration patterns that support flexible, production‑ready AI solutions at pace.

Working closely with Enterprise Architecture, Security, Data, Platforms, and senior business leaders, you’ll ensure all AI solutions are robust, compliant, and aligned to organisational goals. You’ll also provide technical leadership across the engineering community, mentoring senior engineers, setting technical governance standards, and championing responsible and ethical AI practices.

This is a flexible hybrid role, with occasional visits to our offices in Salford Quays (Manchester) or Haywards Heath (West Sussex) when needed. We offer excellent flexibility in working patterns, along with a supportive, people‑focused culture that we’re proud of.

Core skills we’re looking for to succeed in the role:

• Python & Modern AI Framework Expertise: Expert‑level Python development and strong familiarity with modern AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain or equivalent).
• Systems Architecture & Distributed Design: Exceptional system design and architectural reasoning skills, particularly for distributed and AI‑driven systems.
• Innovation, Pragmatism & Operational Awareness: Ability to balance innovation with pragmatism, risk, and operational constraints.
• Communication, Influence & Stakeholder Engagement: Outstanding communication and influencing skills, able to engage effectively at engineer, architect, and executive levels.
• AI Reliability & Governance: Demonstrable leadership in AI Ops, including monitoring, governance and operational resilience.
• Strategic Thinking with Hands‑On Delivery: Strong strategic thinking combined with the ability to remain hands‑on when required.

What’s involved:

• You’ll define and own the enterprise AI engineering strategy, vision, and solution design standards across both custom‑built and integrated AI solutions.
• You’ll evaluate, select, and adopt emerging AI technologies, balancing in‑house development with vendor platforms to ensure flexibility and avoid lock‑in.
• You’ll design secure, scalable AI platforms and systems spanning Azure OpenAI, multi‑provider LLMs, orchestration layers, and enterprise integration patterns.
• You’ll establish and govern best‑practice engineering patterns for model integration, API‑first design, vector search, and deployment of AI services.
• You’ll oversee delivery and operationalisation of AI platforms and solutions, whether internally engineered or externally sourced, ensuring they meet enterprise readiness criteria.
• You’ll set and enforce AI engineering governance for model lifecycle management, testing, validation, observability, and compliance.
• You’ll partner across Enterprise Architecture, Security, Data, Platforms, and business teams to ensure solutions align with regulatory, security, and risk expectations.
• You’ll provide senior technical leadership across cloud infrastructure, identity, networking, and security needed to support AI workloads.
• You’ll mentor and develop senior engineers, fostering communities of practice and uplifting engineering capability and reusable frameworks.
• You’ll champion Responsible AI and ensure all AI solutions, built or integrated, meet ethical, fair, transparent, and secure standards.

Experience & knowledge:

• Extensive experience designing and leading enterprise-scale AI and Generative AI platforms in production environments.
• Deep expertise in cloud-based AI services, particularly Azure OpenAI, Cognitive Services, and advanced RAG architectures.
• Proven ability to design API-first, microservices-based AI systems integrated into complex enterprise ecosystems.
• Strong background in Azure infrastructure, networking, identity, and security architecture.
• Significant experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and cloud-native deployment strategies.
• Demonstrated leadership in AI Ops / including monitoring, governance, and operational resilience.
• Broad understanding of adjacent AI disciplines such as NLP, Computer Vision, and data engineering.
• Prior experience in financial services or insurance sectors advantageous.
• Familiarity with AzureML, Databricks, related Azure technologies, Docker, Kubernetes, and containerization is advantageous.

Skills:

• Expert-level Python development and strong familiarity with modern AI frameworks (e.g. LangChain or equivalent).
• Exceptional system design and architectural reasoning skills, particularly for distributed and AI-driven systems.
• Ability to balance innovation with pragmatism, risk, and operational constraints.
• Outstanding communication and influencing skills, able to engage effectively at engineer, architect, and executive levels.
• Strong strategic thinking combined with the ability to remain hands-on when required.

Behaviors:

• Embrace, embed and incorporate the company values.
• Self-motivated and enthusiastic.
• An organised and proactive approach.
• Strong stakeholder management.
• Ability to work on own initiative and as part of a team.
• A flexible approach and positive attitude.
• Strives to drive business improvements to contribute to the success of the business.

If you’re excited by the idea of shaping meaningful AI solutions and influencing how an organisation embraces intelligent technology, this is a role where your impact will truly be felt.

What can we do for you?

People first. Always. We’re passionate about our colleagues and know the best people deserve an extraordinary working environment. We owe it to them so that’s what we offer. Our workplaces are energetic, inspirational, supportive.