Senior AI and Automation Engineer in Redhill, Surrey

Location: UK (Flexible / Hybrid)

Benefits:

• 9-day working fortnight
• Competitive pension scheme
• 33 days annual leave
• One paid volunteering day each year
• Enhanced parental leave
• Private medical cover
• Annual bonus (subject to company & individual performance)

What this role is (and isn't):

To be considered, you must be technical and hands-on, with direct experience building, deploying, and supporting AI or automation in a real organisation, improving how people work day-to-day.

• A hands-on engineering role
• Focused on internal transformation
• About building and embedding working solutions
• Adopting team working behaviours with excellent communication and interpersonal skills

This is not a strategy, advisory, or research role.

Why this role exists:

Binnies is evolving from a traditional engineering and consultancy business into a tech-enabled solutions partner. We're using AI, automation, and modern platforms to:

• Make Binnies a better, more productive place to work
• Reduce friction and manual effort
• Be a more capable, modern partner for our clients
• Continually find better ways to do what we did yesterday

This role exists to make that real - internally first - by building things people actually use.

What you'll actually do:

You are the person who makes AI real inside the business. You will:

• Identify and prioritise high-value AI and automation opportunities
• Design, build, and deploy secure, scalable AI-enabled tools and workflows
• Integrate AI into existing platforms and ways of working
• Partner with IT, Digital, and business teams to embed change
• Iterate based on real usage and feedback
• Establish practical patterns and guardrails for internal AI use

This is an internally facing role. Success is measured by impact, adoption, and improvement of services to our clients.

What you're good at:

You're a pragmatic engineer who enjoys fixing real problems. You have demonstrable experience in:

• Core engineering
• Writing and maintaining production-quality code (e.g. Python, C#)
• Designing and consuming REST APIs
• Git-based workflows and DevOps-led development
• Cloud & DevOps
• Deploying and running services in Azure
• Using managed services (App Services, Functions, containers)
• Owning CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps)
• Managing environments, secrets, and configuration securely
• Balancing cost, performance, and reliability
• Applied AI
• Working with Azure OpenAI APIs beyond prompt demos
• Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• Embeddings, vector stores, and evaluation
• Guardrails, rate limiting, and failure handling
• Human-in-the-loop workflows
• Integration & automation
• Integrating AI into existing enterprise systems
• Automating end-to-end workflows (not just isolated tasks)
• Working with legacy systems and imperfect data

You understand security, permissions, and data sensitivity and why regulated environments require judgement.

You've done this before:

In previous roles, you've:

• Reduced everyday friction through AI or automation
• Built tools people actually relied on
• Shipped small improvements and iterated quickly
• Worked pragmatically around constraints
• Learned from things that didn't land and improved them

Your background may include consultancy, a scale-up, or internal transformation in a larger organisation.

Your previous job title may have included (or something similar):

• Senior AI & Automation Engineer
• Business AI Engineer
• Intelligent Automation Lead
• Applied AI Engineer
• Digital Automation Lead
• Enterprise Automation Architect
• Internal Platforms / Productivity Engineer

Titles matter less than what you've built and shipped.

This role may not be for you if:

• You mainly want to define AI strategy rather than implement solutions
• You prefer research or experimentation over delivery
• You're looking for a programme- or people-management role
• You need perfect data or conditions before starting

Why you'll enjoy working here:

• You have real licence to build and deploy
• You're trusted to focus on value, not noise
• You work in a small team that asks, How can we do this better than last time?
• You help shape how a well-established organisation evolves
• Your work is visible, useful and appreciated at all levels

If this sounds like you:

You may already be doing parts of this role - but feeling constrained by slow decision-making or lack of mandate. Here, you'll have the space and support to do the work properly. It won't always be easy, but it will be meaningful - and genuinely career-defining.