Artificial Intelligence Engineer in Southampton

Fully remote (UK based only)

£100,000 plus + bonus + private healthcare

Permanent - Full-time employment

This role is for an experienced AI Engineer with proven production experience building LLM-based systems for long, noisy and highly regulated text documentation, ideally in highly regulated domains.

You will take technical ownership of NLP and LLM systems already in live use within a medico-legal platform. The focus is on designing, building, evaluating and operating AI systems that work reliably on complex, unstructured documents, not research prototypes or prompt-only solutions. You will remain hands-on across the full lifecycle, from problem framing and model design through to deployment, monitoring and iteration in production.

The role involves leading the design and operation of LLM driven systems used to process large volumes of long-form, unstructured and inconsistent text common to healthcare and legal workflows. The work requires strong judgement around accuracy, auditability, explainability and regulatory constraints. You will act as the technical lead for AI delivery, working closely with MLOps and Data Engineering teams and mentoring junior AI engineers.

Key responsibilities:

• Design, build and operate LLM-based systems for long, noisy and highly regulated text documentation (Text Classification, Text Summarisation).
• Own end-to-end delivery of NLP and LLM solutions from concept through to production.
• Build and optimise retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines over large document sets.
• Make clear technical trade-offs between fine-tuning, prompting and retrieval approaches.
• Build and maintain robust evaluation frameworks for accuracy, quality and reliability.
• Monitor model behaviour, performance and drift in live environments.
• Work with MLOps to deploy, retrain and version models using production-grade pipelines.
• Ensure explainability, auditability and responsible AI practices are embedded by design.
• Set technical standards and mentor junior engineers across the AI team.

Required experience:

• Demonstrable experience building LLM-based systems for long, noisy, document-heavy data in production.
• Strong hands-on experience with NLP and LLMs, including transformers, fine-tuning and RAG.
• Proven experience working with highly unstructured text in regulated or compliance-heavy environments.
• Experience designing and running model evaluation and monitoring in production.
• Clear understanding of explainability, auditability and governance for AI systems.
• Strong understanding of MLOps practices, CI/CD pipelines and model versioning.
• Experience in regulated domains is strongly preferred.

Career progression:

This role is the technical lead for the AI function, with ownership of delivery quality, standards and mentoring. As the team grows, scope can expand into broader technical leadership while remaining hands-on.