AI Enabled SDLC Engineer in London

About Us: ClearRoute is an engineering consultancy bridging Quality Engineering, Cloud Platforms and Developer Experience. We help enterprises reliably bring high-impact digital products to market faster, cheaper, and safer, working with technology leaders facing complex business challenges. We take as much pride in our people, culture and work-life balance as we do in making better software. We’re not just making better software. We’re making the making of software better. Collaborative, entrepreneurial and dedicated to problem solving, we bring the step change our customers need to sustain innovation. Our values challenge us to do the best we can for ClearRoute, our customers and most importantly our team. This is an opportunity for you to build the organisation from the ground up, use your voice to drive change and help transform organisations and problem domains.

Role: Hands-on technical lead responsible for delivering production-quality Python/FastAPI services on agentic development platform. Senior engineering presence within a fast-moving, matrixed programme, expected to lead by example, set standards, and drive delivery without waiting for direction. Works directly with chief architect to translate an evolving platform vision into working, well-tested software increments. Plays a central role in scaling agentic ways of working across 120+ engineers, acting as a practitioner-coach for teams onboarding onto AI-assisted development. Operates at the intersection of application delivery and platform adoption, building real services while helping establish the engineering culture the programme depends on.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and ship Python/FastAPI services on the platform, owning quality from acceptance criteria through to production.
• Establish and enforce engineering guardrails through acceptance tests, architecture tests, and coded standards covering line limits, design patterns, import rules, and layering.
• Use agentic editors (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) as a core daily delivery tool and guide other engineers on safe, productive, and governed use.
• Identify and mitigate agent failure modes in practice — including prompt injection, scope creep, hallucinated APIs, and unsafe code edits — before they reach production.
• Work cross-functionally across cloud, AI, Snowflake, and application teams to proactively surface blockers, resolve ambiguity, and keep delivery momentum.

Required Experience:

• 6+ months of sustained, hands-on delivery using agentic editors (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) in a real production codebase — evidenced with specific examples, not experiments or demos.
• Strong Python and FastAPI in production — building application-layer backend services, not infrastructure scripting or automation.
• Deep, practical understanding of agent failure modes and how to mitigate them within an engineering delivery workflow.
• Acceptance and architecture testing fluency — writes tests before code by instinct, and can enforce coding standards programmatically through automated test suites.
• Proven ability to lead technical delivery in ambiguous, fast-moving environments without a dedicated product manager.

Desirable Experience:

• Experience working in financial services or a regulated enterprise environment where governance, audit, and compliance are first-class concerns.
• Background re-architecting legacy or Excel-based applications into modern, well-structured services.
• Exposure to internal developer platforms or paved-road engineering — understanding how platform and application layers interact.
• Experience coaching or mentoring engineers on agentic development practices, including how to review, test, and govern AI-generated code.
• Familiarity with the broader technology stack: AWS-native development, GitHub Actions pipelines, and integration with skills marketplace or API catalogue patterns.

At ClearRoute, we believe diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes, and inclusion creates the conditions for everyone to thrive. We are proud to have built a family friendly working environment and have many employees who have caring responsibilities alongside work. We welcome applications from people who require flexibility and will be happy to discuss needs on an individual basis. We are committed to fostering a culture where all team members feel respected, supported, and empowered to do their best work. We celebrate individuality and our differences and understand that some differences may mean that you require changes made to the interview process. We are happy to cater to your needs to make the interview accessible, if this is something you require please let us know by emailing us at join@clearroute.io