Senior AI Engineer in Reading

Build production-grade LLM and GenAI solutions inside one of the UK's fastest-growing enterprise AI teams. This is a hands-on engineering role with a multi-award-winning UK consultancy whose AI practice has scaled rapidly through strategic acquisition and a strong delivery pipeline across commercial, central government and defence clients.

What you’ll be doing:

• Designing and building production LLM and GenAI solutions in Python — from prototype through architecture to deployment.
• Implementing advanced RAG pipelines — hybrid search, re-ranking, query rewriting, context compression, evaluation and grounding.
• Working with vector stores such as Azure AI Search, Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate and Chroma, and tuning embedding models for enterprise data.
• Building agentic systems using frameworks like LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, LangChain, LlamaIndex and AutoGen — tool use, function calling, multi-step reasoning and orchestration.
• Integrating foundation models via Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock and open-weight model endpoints (Llama, Mistral, Claude, GPT family).
• Applying prompt engineering, guardrails, evaluation and observability — using tooling such as LangSmith, Langfuse, Ragas, promptfoo and Azure AI Content Safety.
• Productionising solutions with FastAPI, async Python, Pydantic, Docker and Kubernetes, deployed into Azure-native infrastructure.
• Partnering with data engineers, solution architects and advisory consultants on end-to-end AI programmes.
• Engaging directly with senior client stakeholders to shape solution direction.

What you’ll bring:

• Proven Python engineering background — clean, tested, production-ready code.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM / GenAI solutions in production — not just POCs or notebooks.
• Strong working knowledge of RAG patterns, agentic frameworks, vector databases and embedding models.
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, LLM evaluation and guardrail design (hallucination mitigation, prompt injection defence, content safety).
• Experience with cloud-native deployment — Azure preferred, with Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD.
• Solid grasp of LLMOps — versioning, tracing, monitoring, cost management and responsible AI.
• Consultative, client-ready communication — comfortable translating ambiguous business problems into AI solutions.

Why this role stands out:

• Join a fast-scaling AI practice backed by two strategic acquisitions and a packed pipeline of enterprise GenAI delivery.
• Advisory-led, not body-shop — you shape the solution, not just implement someone else’s design.
• Work across commercial, central government and defence — genuinely interesting problems, not just marketing chatbots.
• Top Employer award winner with an exceptional benefits package, strong development pathways, and a culture that consistently ranks among the best in UK tech consulting.
• Real ownership, real impact, and a clear runway into senior technical leadership.

In return you will get:

• Competitive compensation package with strong base salary and bonus opportunities.
• Generous and growing annual leave, including loyalty days and birthday leave (up to 29 days total).
• Comprehensive health support, including private medical insurance and 24/7 wellbeing assistance.
• Family-first policies with enhanced maternity, adoption, and paternity leave.
• Flexible, trust-based working environment designed to support work–life balance.
• Ongoing investment in people through training, coaching, wellbeing support, and lifestyle perks.

Bright Purple is an equal opportunities employer: we are proud to work with clients who share our values of diversity and inclusion in our industry.