Principal AI Platform Engineer in Stone

Location: Stone, Staffordshire – Hybrid working, 2 days a week in our Stone Office

Status: Permanent

Package: Competitive Salary, Flexible Working, Development & Opportunity (Personal & Technical), Private Medical (Optical & Dental options), Matching Contributory Pension, 25 Days Leave + Public Holidays + Buy and Sell Scheme, Life Insurance, Referral Scheme, Employee Assistance Programme, Benefits Hub

Role Summary: This is a principal-level individual contributor role within Platform Engineering, responsible for defining and delivering the AI platform that underpins Instem’s adoption of AI across both the enterprise and our product portfolio. You will build shared capabilities, integration patterns and guardrails that enable teams to safely and effectively leverage AI, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, observable and aligned with regulatory expectations. The role goes beyond platform build, enabling adoption at scale, empowering teams to use AI confidently, embedding advanced capabilities into products and ensuring consistent, production-grade approaches across the organisation.

• AI Platform & Integration: Define and build reusable AI platform capabilities on Azure; Establish standard patterns for RAG, agents, tool use and model lifecycle management; Design secure integration patterns enabling AI to interact with enterprise systems, products and external tools.
• Adoption & Enablement: Enable teams across engineering, product and corporate functions to safely adopt AI; Provide reusable SDKs, templates and reference architectures to accelerate delivery; Drive practical adoption of AI tools (e.g., Microsoft 365 Copilot, agents, workflows) with measurable impact.
• Product AI: Partner with product teams to embed advanced, production-grade AI capabilities into customer-facing solutions; Define patterns for evaluation, fallback, human oversight and auditability; Ensure AI enhances product differentiation while remaining supportable and compliant.
• Platform as a Product: Treat the AI platform as a product, with clear consumers, adoption metrics and continuous improvement; Optimise for usability, performance and cost efficiency.
• Security, Governance & Resilience: Define safe AI usage patterns across data, prompts, models and outputs; Ensure systems are resilient, observable and aligned with regulatory and security requirements; Embed governance into delivery, not just process.
• Leadership & Influence: Influence architecture, product and engineering teams as a senior individual contributor; Help shape the organisation’s AI operating model and standards; Mentor engineers and raise the bar for AI engineering across the organisation.

Expected Skills, Knowledge, Experience:

• Strong experience in platform, cloud or software engineering, delivering production-grade systems at scale.
• Deep hands-on experience with modern AI systems, including LLMs, RAG, agents and evaluation approaches.
• Proven experience building reusable platforms, services or developer tooling adopted by multiple teams.
• Strong Azure experience, including AI services, identity (Entra), observability and modern deployment patterns.
• Experience designing secure integration patterns across enterprise and product environments.
• Proficiency in Python and at least one of C# or TypeScript.
• Strong experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Bicep or equivalent) and CI/CD practices.
• Experience with observability and performance management, including AI-specific evaluation and monitoring.
• Strong understanding of security, identity and access control in enterprise environments.
• Ability to influence without authority, working across multiple teams and disciplines.
• Experience working within structured governance frameworks (e.g., architectural review boards, QMS-aligned environments).

Desirable:

• Experience in regulated environments (e.g., life sciences, healthtech, GxP).
• Familiarity with AI governance, data protection and audit requirements (e.g., GDPR, 21 CFR Part 11).
• Experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot, agents or enterprise AI workflow integration.
• Familiarity with MCP or secure external tool integration patterns.
• Knowledge of the Company’s Quality Management System and its application to tasks associated with this role.

An Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.