Senior AI and Data Engineer

Location: Hybrid Working – London N3 / EC4M

Working Hours: Monday to Friday, 35 hour week (Flexitime)

Reporting to: Operations & Transformation Director

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000

About the Team: You’ll be joining our Strategy and Transformation Team, working at the heart of BKL’s AI capability. The team works closely with senior leadership, operational stakeholders and colleagues across service lines, supporting them with technology delivery, strategic change, and digital transformation. We’re collaborative, innovative and outcome‑focused, offering exposure to firm‑wide transformation initiatives and the opportunity to help shape our evolving data and AI capabilities.

We’re looking for a hands‑on and versatile Data & AI engineer who’s excited to ship production AI systems in a professional services firm. You’ll work closely with senior stakeholders to scope opportunities to use AI and then partner with teams to develop point solutions for these. The solutions will range in nature from intelligent document processing to agentic workflows that augment our advisors and drive real productivity. If you’re pragmatic, curious, and motivated by impact, we’d love to hear from you.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and deploy production‑grade data and AI systems, from ingestion and transformation pipelines through to the AI applications that run on them.
• Build and maintain reliable data pipelines and lakehouse infrastructure that serve both analytics and AI workloads across the firm.
• Own technical decisions across the stack – from data modelling and pipeline design to retrieval, evaluation and deployment patterns.
• Build robust evaluation frameworks to measure and improve system quality over time.
• Scope new opportunities and gather requirements with business teams, capturing and prioritising requirements and defining what good looks like before building.
• Partner closely with teams across the firm as a trusted adviser, running discovery to understand how they work, analysing their processes and pain points, and shaping and scoping point solutions together that deliver measurable business value.
• Contribute to our engineering standards, mentoring others and raising the bar on code quality, testing, and operational excellence.
• Stay close to the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem and bring relevant innovations into our work.

Required Skills & Experience:

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of developing production‑grade systems.
• Strong expertise in Python and SQL.
• Solid understanding of data engineering foundations – orchestrating ETL/ELT pipelines, data modelling, and working with large datasets in a lakehouse/warehouse setting.
• A genuinely collaborative, business‑facing approach – comfortable acting as the bridge between business and technology: running discovery with non‑technical teams, gathering and analysing requirements, and translating business problems into scoped, high‑impact AI solutions together.
• Hands‑on experience building LLM‑powered applications, with strong underlying skills (prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool use and evaluation).
• Experience building agentic workflows or retrieval‑augmented (RAG) applications.
• Strong CI/CD and production deployment discipline – testing, observability, versioning and safe rollout.
• Experience with Databricks (Unity Catalog, Delta, PySpark) or equivalent lakehouse platforms.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related STEM field.

Desired Skills & Experience:

• Experience building on Microsoft or Azure AI platforms (such as Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio or the Power Platform), or the appetite to get up to speed quickly.
• Familiarity with agent and tool‑integration patterns – function and tool calling, connecting agents to enterprise data and systems, and protocols such as MCP.
• Comfort working across multiple LLM providers and selecting the right model for a given task.
• Experience delivering user‑facing tools within enterprise environments such as Microsoft 365, Teams or the web.
• Fluency with AI‑assisted development tooling in day‑to‑day development.
• Background in professional services, consultancy or another regulated or advisory environment.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to non‑technical stakeholders.

Benefits:

• Private Medical Insurance (PMI) – including mental health cover, hospital treatment & 24/7 GP access
• Health Cash Plans – covering everyday costs like dental, optical & physiotherapy and an Employee Assistance Programme
• Pension scheme – helping you save for retirement in a tax‑efficient way
• Group Life Assurance – financial protection for your loved ones
• Cashback & savings portal – discounts across hundreds of high‑street and online retailers
• Cycle to Work Scheme – spread the cost of a new bike and accessories tax‑free
• Electric Vehicle Scheme – sustainable transportation options that include roadside support and servicing
• Free Mortgage Advice – expert guidance for your home‑buying journey
• Season Ticket Loan – support with travel expenses
• Enhanced Family Leave – generous leave policies for family‑related needs
• Holiday Entitlement – generous entitlement which increases with promotion

Compliance & Equal Opportunities: In addition to the responsibilities listed above, you will be required to undertake GDPR training to fully understand the regulations and ensure all work is carried out in a compliant manner. BKL is an equal opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified candidates eligible to work in the UK. Inclusion, diversity and talent development are a fundamental aspect of who we are, and we welcome applications from candidates who share and champion these values. By applying, you consent to the processing of your personal data for recruitment purposes, in line with UK GDPR. Your information will be used securely, only for recruitment, and won’t be shared without your consent. For details, see our Privacy Policy – BKL.