Senior AI Engineer in Oxford

Senior AI Engineer x 2 Contract - Outside IR35 - 6 months+ Oxfordshire OR London £700 - £900 per day DOE Our client is a rapidly scaling UK deep-tech company delivering advanced AI capability into some of the most consequence-heavy environments there are: defence and national security, critical national infrastructure, and enterprise clients whose decisions carry real weight. They're hiring two Senior Applied AI Engineers to take ownership of the agentic AI systems underpinning their platform, on a contract basis, with genuine influence over how those systems are architected and delivered. This role suits an engineer who designs and ships systems rather than assembling pre-built components - someone who cares more about how a system performs once it's live and under pressure than how impressive it looks in a demo. What You'll Be Doing Architecting and building multi-agent AI systems end-to-end, combining frameworks such as LangGraph or Haystack where they add value with bespoke orchestration, state management and tool-calling logic where a framework won't cut it Writing production-grade code with reliability, latency and graceful failure handling designed in from the start rather than bolted on afterwards Embedding LLMs and vision-language models into live reasoning, search, summarisation and task-execution workflows, backed by solid retrieval, memory and guardrail design Deploying across cloud, on...