AI Systems Architect in London

Build the intelligence layer for a specialist property practice.

About the role

Most AI engineering roles put you inside a large organisation, maintaining someone else's stack, working toward a roadmap you did not set. This is not that. Axo Consulting is a specialist property consultancy advising lenders, funders, and developers across cost consultancy, project monitoring, and development management. We have deep domain expertise, a clear commercial model, and a genuine problem worth solving: making expert human judgement faster, more consistent, and more scalable without diluting it.

We are looking for an AI Systems Architect to build the workflows, agents, and data infrastructure that sit underneath our practice. You will work directly with surveyors who understand the domain deeply and co-owners who understand the business. The architecture is yours to design.

Why this is a rare opportunity

Vertical AI in professional services is only valuable when it is grounded in genuine domain knowledge. At Axo, that knowledge is in the room with you every day. Most engineers building property AI are doing it at arm's length from the people who actually understand how a scheme fails, how a drawdown gets challenged, or what makes a cost plan credible. You will not have that problem here.

What you will build

• The intelligence in our system is human. Your job is to build everything around it that makes that intelligence go further, faster.

Agents and workflows:

• Design and build AI agents for domain-specific QS tasks: drawdown analysis, cost benchmarking, risk signal extraction from documents.
• Architect multi-step agentic workflows using LLM frameworks such as LangChain, CrewAI, or custom tooling.
• Build document ingestion and processing pipelines for contracts, cost plans, and monitoring reports.
• Create reliable, auditable outputs that surveyors can trust and stand behind in front of clients.
• Iterate rapidly with the QS team and refine based on domain feedback.

Data and infrastructure:

• Design the data architecture: structured storage, vector databases, retrieval and context strategies.
• Build and maintain APIs connecting internal tooling, external data sources, and client-facing outputs.
• Evaluate and integrate proptech data feeds, planning portals, and market intelligence sources.
• Ensure systems are robust, secure, and fit for a regulated advisory context.
• Own the stack end to end, from prototype to something colleagues depend on daily.

What working here looks like

You will be the first dedicated technical hire at Axo. That means genuine ownership and genuine influence over what gets built and how. You will not be working in isolation. You will be embedded with surveyors who can explain exactly why a drawdown gets rejected, what makes a cost plan credible, and where the real risk in a scheme lives.

Joe Garner MRICS, Co-owner, has led residential development teams from planning through construction, delivering over 100 homes. He will be your primary domain partner, translating surveying problems into clear engineering briefs and giving you honest feedback on whether the output is actually useful.

Steve Cheesman, Co-owner, brings lender-side advisory experience and a focus on governance, auditability, and commercial robustness. He will push you to build things that hold up in high-stakes contexts, not just in demos.

Both co-owners are technically literate and commercially driven. Expect direct engagement, clear priorities, and no layers between you and the people making decisions. The stack is yours to shape. We have strong views on what the output needs to do, and open minds about how to get there.

Who you are

You are technically strong and productively restless. You want to build something real in a domain that matters, not maintain another pipeline.

Technical:

• Strong Python, comfortable with backend architecture and API design.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agent frameworks, in production or serious personal projects.
• Solid understanding of RAG, vector stores, prompt engineering, and context management.
• Experience with data pipelines and handling both structured and unstructured data.
• CS, data, or software background, formal or entirely self-taught.

Mindset:

• Entrepreneurial: you see a problem and want to own the fix from end to end.
• Curious about how specialist professional knowledge can be encoded and augmented.
• Comfortable working with non-technical stakeholders and translating between domains.
• Drawn to early-stage environments where craft and product instinct matter equally.
• Interested in real estate, finance, or the built environment, or genuinely open to becoming so.

What we offer

• Salary: competitive, DOE plus performance uplift.
• Location: Soho, W1, hybrid and flexi hours.
• Ownership: greenfield technical build, the architecture is yours.
• Domain: rare access to expert knowledge, daily.
• Tech budget: included, APIs, tools, compute.
• Culture: lean team, build things that ship.

About Axo

Axo Consulting is a UK-based consultancy operating across the planning, development, and real estate sectors. Our services span pre-planning and land search, development management, cost consultancy, and independent project monitoring for funders and developers.

Our philosophy is simple: expert human judgement, at speed. We have never believed that technology replaces the surveyor in the room. What technology does is free that person to do more of the work that matters, and less of the work that gets in the way of it.

We are a lean, co-owner-led practice at an inflection point. The right person for this role will not just join a consultancy. They will help define what one looks like in ten years.

How to apply

Show us something you have built. Describe a hard technical problem you have solved. Tell us why a specialist property consultancy is an interesting place to deploy serious engineering talent. No CV templates or covering letter frameworks. We want to hear how you think.