Senior AI Engineer in Leeds

We are looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to join our Engineering Community and help shape and deliver AI-powered solutions across our large-scale, operationally critical client projects. We've had some significant AI wins over the last couple of years — deploying AI into the NHS, helping energy providers transform how they process customer data, and most recently winning a place on Yorkshire Water's AI Framework. This is a senior, hands-on, client-facing role focused on building production-grade AI systems that deliver measurable impact.

What you'll actually do:

• Design and build LLM-based applications: RAG pipelines, agentic workflows (LangGraph and similar), structured generation, evaluation frameworks.
• Make architectural decisions that hold up in production - chunking strategy, retrieval design, model selection, observability, cost.
• Build the evaluation harnesses that let us prove a system works before it goes live, and keep working after it does.
• Work directly with clients in discovery workshops, scoping sessions and delivery - translating "we want to use AI to do X" into a buildable backlog.
• Mentor mid-level engineers in our Engineering Community as our AI capability grows.
• Pair with our pre-sales team on bids and shape technical responses to public sector procurements.

What we're looking for:

• You've built and shipped production LLM systems. You can talk in detail about the decisions you made and what you'd do differently.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major model family (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, Mistral) in a production setting — including the unglamorous parts: latency, cost, prompt versioning, regression testing.
• Experience designing RAG systems beyond the tutorial level — chunking trade-offs, hybrid search, re-ranking, evaluation.
• Experience with at least one agent framework (LangGraph, LlamaIndex, or your own) and a clear view on when agents are the right tool versus when they're overkill.
• Comfortable working with vector stores (Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, pgVector, or similar).
• Solid software engineering fundamentals — testing, CI/CD, observability — applied to non-deterministic systems.
• Comfortable in client-facing settings, including running technical workshops and explaining trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.

Bonus points for any of:

• NHS or wider public sector delivery experience, or familiarity with frameworks like DTAC, DCB0129, DSPT.
• Experience with speech-to-text / text-to-speech integration.
• Multi-modal work (vision models, document extraction, OCR).
• Knowledge graphs alongside vector retrieval.
• Experience with sovereign cloud or in-estate model deployment.

The perks of being @ Answer:

• We’re an Employee-Owned Company. After 12 months – through the Employee Ownership Trust you will be part of the ownership of Answer; a major factor in driving engagement, retention and growth for our people.
• Competitive salary.
• Flexible annual leave (buy/sell and carry forward).
• Twice a year income-tax free bonus based on company performance - it’s a reward for being a part of our EOT journey.
• Continuous training and development - if you want to learn, we’ll provide the support you need.
• Flexible Pension - we match your own contributions up to 5%.
• A flexible Healthcare cash plan so you can fund the care you value most.
• A packed social calendar including; end of year party (partners invited) and Summer away days, monthly and quarterly company team socials.
• Parking at Head Offices in central Leeds, plus Cycle2Work & Green Car Lease schemes to help get you here.
• The chance to give back – get involved nationally and regionally with partnerships to get people from different backgrounds into tech, as well as lots of charity and community events.

Diversity and Inclusion:

At Answer we proudly embrace diversity and inclusion - we want to create a safe environment for everyone to bring their true selves to work. We will do everything we can to support your application. If you require any adjustments to be made to your application (whether that’s support with our interview questions, adjusting how we interview, or financial support with our hiring process) then please speak to Lesley Waghorn (Senior Talent Acquisition Consultant) lesley.waghorn@answerdigital.com.

A bit more about us:

Answer Digital is a highly successful digital transformation consultancy headquartered in Leeds. We’re a company on a fast growth trajectory with a reputation of delivering large-scale, operational critical solutions. People are at the heart of everything we do - so much so we’re owned by our people. It sets us apart from most digital businesses you’ll meet and defines our culture and values. Our people are invested in everything we do, because we are invested in them.

Our Interview Process:

We pride ourselves on having a fair but flexible recruitment process, we want to create a platform where you can show us your best. For us, keeping it simple means you can focus on understanding if our people, values and the work we do are right for you. Our typical process can be broken down into 3 stages:

• Recruiter call: This normally lasts 15-30 minutes. We will talk to you about Answer Digital, the type of work we do, and an overview of the role. We’ll ask you some questions about your current situation and why you’re interested in working here. Here, we’d advise asking any “people” questions, anything about our culture, career progression or approach to flexible working.
• Skills based interview: This interview will be with 2 people, normally from the team you’re applying to work with. We can do this stage remote or in person, whichever you’d prefer. This interview will involve questions around your experience, the skills you’ve gained and the work you’ve done. We’ll also ask questions about the role and challenges you might face and how you’d face them. Here, we’d recommend asking questions about the role, the day to day responsibilities and what life in the team is like.
• Cultural/Value interview: This interview will be with 2 of our Leadership team, either our Directors or Capability Leads. It will focus on our culture and values, talking about our values and what they mean to us as well as understanding what values are important to you and how you like to work. This interview is about making sure Answer is right for you, as much as the other way around. Here, we advise you to ask as many questions around our business model, our ambitious growth plans and anything to do with Answer as a business.