AI Engineer, AI Lab London - Commercial

We are an organisation that exists to drive progress. That's the "red thread" that connects everyone at The Economist Group (TEG). Our businesses share a devotion to innovation, independence and rigour in their fields of expertise. We empower people to understand and tackle the critical challenges and changes facing the world. Our analytical rigour, global expertise and evidence-based insights enable individuals and organisations to make sense of these shifts and chart a course through them.

We deliver analysis and insights in many formats to subscribers and clients in 170 countries through our four businesses, The Economist, Economist Impact, Economist Intelligence and Economist Education, which uphold our global reputation for excellence and integrity. The Economist Group is a global media and information services company committed to championing progress. We equip individuals and organisations with expertise, insights, and perspectives to navigate change and drive growth.

This is a full-time role at the centre of our new AI Lab, a small team exploring how generative AI might shape the future of Economist journalism. This role will focus on building and fine-tuning LLM-powered systems with a particular focus on editorial tone, style transfer, retrieval workflows, and multimodal generation (especially audio). You'll ship products from zero-to-one and see your ideas directly influence how millions of readers interact with our journalism. If you enjoy working close to design, iterating fast, and building novel interactions across text, voice, and visuals, we'd love to hear from you. You'll be one of the first three engineers in a dedicated lab, working alongside the Tech Lead, Design Lead and Product Lead.

What You’ll Do

• Fine-tune large language models (LLMs) for style and tone alignment with The Economist's editorial voice
• Design, curate, and manage datasets used for fine-tuning, including versioning and annotation workflows
• Build and evaluate RAG pipelines that incorporate retrieval from structured content
• Prototype and test TTS (text-to-speech) pipelines for use in audio-first products (leveraging tools like ElevenLabs, OpenAI TTS etc)
• Collaborate with infra, frontend, and design leads to ship internal tools and demos that explore GenAI capabilities
• Own quality evaluation pipelines (BLEU, ROUGE, editorial scoring, custom evals), including human-in-the-loop feedback loops
• Support product experiments where real-time generation, summarisation, or personalization are being tested
• Partner directly with journalists and editors to develop novel evaluation metrics that capture the nuances of The Economist's tone and style

Specific Skills and Expertise

• 3+ years experience building with LLMs or NLP pipelines (ideally hands‐on with OpenAI, Claude, Cohere, Gemini, Mistral, HuggingFace)
• Experience with supervised fine‐tuning (SFT), prompt tuning, or instruction tuning on proprietary datasets
• Strong understanding of fine‐tuning paradigms, from SFT to the principles behind RLHF/RLAIF preference modeling
• Strong Python skills, including working with LangChain, HuggingFace Transformers, and data pipelines (Pandas, DVC, Weights & Biases)
• Comfortable defining and tracking generation quality with eval metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, and building editorial‐specific evaluators
• Exposure to STT / TTS tools for prototyping (e.g., Whisper, ElevenLabs, Bark, etc.)
• Strong communication and collaboration mindset — able to work closely with editorial and product stakeholders
• Curious and exploratory — comfortable working in ambiguity and pushing the boundaries of GenAI capabilities

Strong Candidates Might Also Have

• Experience fine-tuning models for style or persona (e.g. chatbots with specific character voices)
• Exposure to LangSmith or similar observability tools for prompt / LLM testing
• Knowledge of voice synthesis, cloning, or emotion conditioning in audio pipelines
• Previous work in media, journalism, podcasting, or content production contexts
• Familiarity with multi‐modal generation (text + image + audio), or interest in pushing toward that frontier
• Contributions to open‐source LLM tools or libraries
• An interest in the ethical, editorial, and philosophical questions raised by AI‐generated content

More About the Economist AI Lab

We believe AI will fundamentally change both our business and the world around us, making our mission more vital than ever. While we already use AI across The Economist Group, we think the changes to come in the next few years could be even more far‐reaching. This is why we are launching the Economist AI Lab—to reimagine Economist journalism for an AI‐driven world. It is a deliberately ambitious project, exploring new ideas and possibilities beyond our existing AI initiatives and engineering roadmap. A small, dedicated team, the AI Lab will serve as an innovation engine for The Economist – investigating bold new ideas that will shape how we serve our global audience in the future.

AI usage for your application

We are an innovative organisation that encourages the use of technology. We recognise that candidates may utilise AI tools to support with their job application process. However, it is essential that all information you provide truthfully and accurately reflects your own experience, skills, and qualifications.

What we offer

Our benefits package is designed to support your wellbeing, growth, and work‐life balance. It includes a highly competitive pension or 401(k) plan, private health insurance, and 24/7 access to counselling and wellbeing resources through our Employee Assistance Program. We also offer a range of lifestyle benefits, including our Work From Anywhere program, which allows you to work from any location where you have the legal right to do so for up to 25 days per year. In addition, we provide generous annual and parental leave, as well as dedicated days off for volunteering and even for moving home. You will also be given free access to all The Economist content, including an online subscription, our range of apps, podcasts and more.