Lead AI Engineer
Haystack’s client is looking to recruit a Lead AI Engineer to join the Engineering Community and play a vital role in shaping and delivering AI-powered solutions across its large-scale, operationally critical client projects.
They’ve had some big AI wins over the last couple of years, from deploying AI solutions into the Public Healthcare Sector , supporting Energy Sector Providers to transform how their customer data is processed, and more recently, winning a spot on a Major Utilities Provider’s AI Framework .
This is a senior, client-facing technical leadership role focused on building production-grade AI systems that deliver measurable impact for our clients.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Defining AI solution architectures aligned to client strategy and business outcomes.
- Creating AI development roadmaps from proof-of-concept through to production deployment.
- Leading the design and build of LLM-based systems, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and multimodal applications.
- Ensuring solutions are secure , scalable, observable, and cost-optimised in cloud environments.
- Translating complex AI concepts into clear, actionable recommendations for stakeholders.
- Mentoring engineers and growing our AI capability within the Engineering Community.
- Working closely with senior client stakeholders to ensure AI solutions deliver measurable value (accuracy, latency, cost, UX, and adoption).
What You’ll Bring
- Proven experience leading technical delivery in client-facing consultancy or enterprise environments.
- Experience translating business problems into production-grade AI solutions.
- Hands-on leadership of cross-functional engineering teams.
- Agile software development experience with continuous delivery.
- Deep experience working with large language models in production environments, working with major model families such as Llama, Mistral, GPT, Claude, and Gemini.
- Experience integrating Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech models into end-user solutions.
- Experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, PGVector (or similar).
- Production deployment experience with AWS Bedrock, Azure Foundry, or Google Vertex AI.
The Perks
- Competitive salary
- Flexible annual leave (buy/sell and carry forward)
- Twice-a-year income-tax-free bonus based on company performance.
- Continuous training and development —if you want to learn, we’ll provide the support you need.
- Flexible Pension —we match your own contributions up to 5%.
- A flexible Healthcare cash plan so you can fund the care you value most.
- A packed social calendar including an end-of-year party (partners invited), summer away days, and monthly/quarterly team socials.
- Parking at Leeds office , plus Cycle2Work & Green Car Lease schemes.
- The chance to give back —get involved nationally and regionally with partnerships to get people from different backgrounds into tech, as well as charity and community events.
