Principal AI Engineer in Leicester

Your Impact

You’ll play a pivotal role in transforming VenturEd into an AI‑enabled EdTech powerhouse.

Early impact projects include:

• Admissions Intelligence Agent — an NLP‑driven system that helps schools assess and qualify student applications more efficiently, with suggestive follow‑up actions.
• Parent Application Assistant — generative tools that guide families in strengthening their applications and discovering well‑matched institutions.

These prototypes will form the foundation of a scalable, AI-driven ecosystem that improves how thousands of schools operate, make decisions, and engage with students and families.

What You’ll Bring

Technical Expertise

• Deep proficiency in Python, machine learning, and modern data‑science techniques.
• Experience deploying and scaling AI systems in multi‑cloud environments (Azure preferred, with AWS exposure).
• Hands-on experience with tools such as Azure Foundry, AWS SageMaker, or similar platforms for model deployment and experimentation.
• Proficiency with agentic frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph), vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma), and prompt‑engineering methodologies.
• Familiarity with LLM operations — fine‑tuning, context‑window extension, RAG pipelines, and model evaluation.
• Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and safety frameworks — particularly within regulated or sensitive environments (education, healthcare, public sector, etc.).
• Experience building and maintaining MLOps pipelines for CI/CD, versioning, and model‑performance monitoring.

Strategic & Collaborative Skills

• Proven ability to bridge technical and business domains while influencing cross‑functional leaders and evangelising AI adoption.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to explain complex AI concepts to non‑technical audiences.
• A builder mindset — comfortable working autonomously, iterating quickly, and delivering production‑grade systems.
• Design, build, and deploy AI‑powered features across VenturEd’s education platforms — including intelligent admissions assistants, automated decision‑support tools, payments solutions supporting over $1bn in transactions, and school communication systems.
• Develop and integrate agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph) and vector database architectures to power natural language workflows for users.
• Implement RAG pipelines, semantic search, and context‑extension frameworks to enhance LLM performance, reliability, and accuracy.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to customise and fine‑tune foundation models (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) for domain‑specific applications.
• Build and manage API configurations, guardrails, and data‑modelling layers to support secure AI deployment within sensitive educational‑data environments.
• Apply ML Ops best practices for deploying, monitoring, and iterating on AI systems in production.
• Partner with Marketing, Sales, Finance, and other internal teams to identify automation opportunities and data‑driven enhancements.
• Develop AI‑powered internal tools and workflows (using platforms like n8n, Copilot, Cursor) to boost cross‑functional productivity.
• Champion a culture of AI adoption through education, experimentation, and showcasing impactful internal use cases.

Proven experience in designing and deploying AI/ML solutions at scale. Excellent communication and leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring engineers. Experience with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and model hosting. Demonstrated ability to drive adoption of AI tools and frameworks across large engineering teams.

Preferred Experience:

• 7+ years of professional experience, with at least 3 years in applied AI/ML roles.
• Prior experience within EdTech, enterprise SaaS, or data-intensive product environments is advantageous.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, generative AI, and AI-powered product features.
• Published work or thought leadership in AI engineering.

VenturEd Solutions helps schools use their time more effectively by providing simple, powerful software solutions. We support all types of schools and multi-academy trusts in the UK, working closely with local authorities, app developers and other education partners. We also serve K12 schools in the US, as well as international schools and other school groups all over the world. We’re united by our mission to support the education sector by reducing costs, offering staff more time to focus on their priorities, and working alongside leadership teams to achieve strategic goals.