Senior AI Engineer

Location: Grimsby (Hybrid Working available)

Salary: £55,000+ dependent on experience, plus bonuses of 17.5% OTE

We are seeking a Senior AI Engineer to join Advantage Finance to both maintain and improve the existing Orion AI solutions, and build the next production AI solution at Advantage Finance. You will work closely with Advantage Finance stakeholders to translate business problems into production-ready systems with rapid, measurable impact.

What makes this role unique (and why it’s exciting)

• This is Advantage Finance’s first dedicated AI hire.
• This role is the step-change to bring AI capability in-house and make it a long-term, core function.
• First-mover impact: shape the foundations (ways of working, standards, tooling) that future AI hires will build on.
• Strategic importance: AI is viewed as central to the company’s growth strategy, with this role forming the basis for further investment.
• High ownership: influence outcomes and help shape the AI roadmap.
• Cross-functional exposure: work day-to-day with business stakeholders and partner closely with the engineering team to ship production systems.
• Paired delivery model: you will be partnered with a Product Manager who will lead the AI project; you’ll be the technical counterpart, shaping solution design, feasibility, delivery approach, and production readiness.
• Production-first: build, harden, and operate systems in a regulated environment.
• Greenfield + stewardship: deliver a new AI solution while keeping existing Orion solutions healthy.

Who this role is for

• A pragmatic builder who ships and iterates in production.
• A strong communicator who can run discovery and manage tradeoffs with stakeholders.
• An engineer comfortable owning end-to-end delivery (data → model → app → monitoring).

Core responsibilities

• Partner closely with the AI Product Manager to translate business goals into an executable technical plan (scope, milestones, tradeoffs).
• Maintain and improve existing Orion AI solutions (reliability, evals, monitoring, safe releases).
• Design and deliver a new AI solution end-to-end (discovery → MVP → production rollout).
• Build/maintain evaluation and observability tooling (quality, drift, safety, performance).
• Partner with AF SMEs, engineering, security, and compliance to ship safely.
• Document and hand over systems so they can be operated long-term.
• Upskill and enable the wider team in effective AI usage (AI-assisted coding practices, patterns for AI/LLM solutions, and pragmatic guardrails) through pairing, lightweight training, and shared standards.

Key requirements

• Experience building and shipping software; meaningful experience delivering ML/LLM systems to production.
• Strong Python + software engineering fundamentals (testing, code quality, CI/CD).
• Experience with modern LLM patterns (RAG, tool use/agents, fine-tuning or prompt systems) and robust evaluation.
• Practical experience operating production systems on-prem or in a private cloud (Linux, containers, networking, monitoring/ops).
• Advantage Finance runs on-prem infrastructure — public cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) experience is welcome but not required; what matters is transferable ops fundamentals.
• Strong stakeholder communication and ability to work with ambiguous requirements.
• Experience mentoring/enablement: helping other engineers and business stakeholders adopt new tooling and ways of working (especially AI-assisted development).

Nice to have

• Experience in financial services / regulated environments.
• Experience with data engineering pipelines and feature stores.
• Experience with multimodal models or speech/voice workflows.

Not a fit for

• Engineers looking for a heavily guided, junior role.
• Engineers who prefer minimal stakeholder interaction.
• Engineers who optimise for theoretical elegance over shipping value.

Salary & Benefits

• Salary negotiable depending on experience.
• Company bonus scheme.
• Additional holiday leave.
• Life insurance.
• Private medical insurance.
• Referral programme.
• Sick pay.
• Wellness programme.

Advantage Finance Ltd is an employer who believes in its people, we are an equal opportunities employer, and we strive to employ, develop and support a diverse workforce. We make recruitment decisions based solely around your experience and skills and love to see our people grow and develop.

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