Lead Ai Engineer (AI/ML/R&D) in Manchester

Location: Hybrid working 3 days a week in the Manchester Office

Bally’s Interactive is the digital arm of one of the world’s leading entertainment providers, with tens of millions of players across the globe and an unmatched ecosystem of products spanning across the sports betting, iGaming, free-to-play, and daily fantasy spectrum.

As Lead AI Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the future of AI across our products. Leading a newly established AI Engineering function, you'll bridge cutting-edge research with production engineering, ensuring innovative AI capabilities become scalable, reliable features used by millions of players.

You'll lead a multidisciplinary team responsible for developing and delivering AI-powered experiences across personalisation, recommendations, intelligent search, AI agents and content discovery. Working closely with product, engineering and data teams, you'll define technical direction, establish engineering best practices and help build a high-performing team capable of delivering AI solutions at scale.

This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll combine technical expertise with people leadership. You'll mentor and develop engineers, influence architecture and technical strategy, and remain close to the code, leading by example on the most complex technical challenges.

What will you be doing?

• Significant commercial software engineering experience, including experience leading technical teams or engineering functions.
• Strong expertise in TypeScript and Python, with a proven track record of delivering AI, machine learning or data-driven solutions into production, including recommendation engines, intelligent search, ranking systems or LLM-powered applications.
• Extensive experience building and operating cloud-native applications on AWS, with strong knowledge of CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability and modern engineering practices.
• Experience delivering high-performance, real-time systems that operate reliably at scale with demanding latency requirements.
• Demonstrated experience leading the successful transition of AI solutions from research or proof of concept into robust, production-ready services.
• Experience establishing technical standards, driving engineering excellence and mentoring or developing engineers within high-performing teams.

What will you need?

• A technical leader who enjoys building, mentoring and developing engineering teams while creating an environment where innovation can thrive.
• Able to balance experimentation with engineering discipline, making sound technical decisions that deliver long-term value.
• Confident leading technical discussions, influencing architecture and making complex decisions across multiple stakeholders.
• Passionate about building scalable, maintainable and observable AI systems using modern engineering best practices.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, data and leadership teams.
• Comfortable remaining hands-on with technology while providing strategic technical leadership and direction.

This is what you'll get:

• Annual leave
• Pension plan
• Health insurance
• Company share scheme
• Home office allowance
• Wellness or Gym allowance

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

At Bally’s Interactive, we are committed to promoting equal opportunities in employment and working conditions. We do not discriminate against employees or job applicants on the basis of race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, age, sex or sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, political opinion or disability.