Senior Technical Lead - AI & Product Engineering (Contract) in London

Rate: £800/day Outside IR35
Duration: Initial 6-Month Contract
Location: London (Hybrid)
Office Attendance: 3 days per week onsite (West London)
Interview Process: 2 Stages

The Opportunity

We're supporting a major international organisation undergoing a significant digital transformation across its operations and supply chain functions.

This is a greenfield opportunity to join a newly formed engineering organisation responsible for building a suite of AI-powered internal products designed to replace manual processes, spreadsheets, and legacy workflows. The programme has strong executive backing, a growing engineering team, and a roadmap of multiple products with significant business impact.

The first product focuses on leveraging Generative AI and LLMs to automate document analysis, extract structured insights, identify commercial risks, and improve operational efficiency across critical business functions.

The Role

As a Senior Technical Lead, you'll provide architectural leadership across multiple engineering teams while working closely with product, data, AI, and business stakeholders.

This is primarily a technical leadership and architecture role rather than a hands-on development position. You'll be responsible for shaping technical strategy, driving engineering excellence, and ensuring scalable, reliable solutions are delivered across a rapidly expanding product portfolio.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and technical direction across multiple product teams
• Own solution design and engineering standards
• Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions
• Drive delivery across AI, software engineering, and data teams
• Mentor engineers and promote best practices
• Ensure solutions are secure, scalable, and production-ready
• Lead technical workshops, whiteboarding sessions, and architectural reviews
• Work closely with stakeholders to define product roadmaps and priorities
• Balance rapid product delivery with long-term platform sustainability

Required Experience

We're particularly interested in candidates who can demonstrate:

• Proven experience leading engineering teams within enterprise environments
• Strong AWS architecture experience
• Deep understanding of modern software architecture and distributed systems
• Strong background in Python and FastAPI
• Experience designing and delivering AI-powered products
• Experience with Agentic AI frameworks such as LangGraph and LangChain
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills
• Experience owning technical roadmaps and software delivery lifecycles
• Ability to operate across engineering, product, and business functions

Desirable Experience

• LLM applications and document-processing platforms
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• React and Next.js
• Snowflake
• Airflow
• Data engineering and ETL pipelines
• Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure
• Supply chain, procurement, or operational systems

Ideal Background

Suitable candidates may come from:

• Product-led technology organisations
• Large-scale enterprise engineering environments
• AI-first startups
• Logistics and supply chain businesses
• Retail and e-commerce
• Insurance or other complex operational industries

We're looking for someone who combines strong architectural thinking with a pragmatic product mindset and is comfortable building systems from the ground up.

What They're Looking For

Beyond technical capability, the team values individuals who are:

• Strategic and commercially minded
• Strong communicators
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity
• Collaborative leaders
• Passionate about AI and modern software engineering
• Able to challenge assumptions and influence senior stakeholders

Interview Process

Stage 1: Technical architecture discussion focused on designing an AI-driven document processing platform.

Stage 2: Final interview with the hiring manager.