Senior AI Engineer (Remote from UK) in London

This role offers the opportunity to design and scale enterprise‑grade document intelligence systems powered by self‑hosted large language models. You will architect and operate production‑ready OCR and LLM pipelines capable of processing complex, long‑form documents with deterministic and auditable outputs. As a hands‑on technical leader, you will own infrastructure decisions, optimize GPU‑backed inference environments, and ensure system reliability at scale. The position combines deep AI engineering with production‑grade backend architecture, focusing on performance, governance, and measurable correctness. Working remotely in a highly collaborative environment, you will partner closely with AI leadership while maintaining end‑to‑end ownership of mission‑critical systems.

Accountabilities

• Architecting and implementing end‑to‑end OCR‑heavy pipelines for long‑form document processing, including PDF ingestion, layout‑aware parsing, segmentation, and metadata tracking.
• Designing scalable systems capable of handling 200+ page documents with high concurrency, performance consistency, and operational stability.
• Integrating and optimizing OCR engines (e.g., Tesseract, PaddleOCR) and layout‑aware or vision‑language models for structured data extraction.
• Building deterministic validation frameworks, including schema enforcement, rule‑based checks, invariant validation, and automated exception routing.
• Deploying and managing self‑hosted LLM infrastructure using tools such as vLLM and Hugging Face TGI, including GPU‑backed inference services.
• Optimizing inference workloads through batching strategies, KV cache tuning, context window management, and cost‑efficiency improvements.
• Implementing robust observability systems with structured logging, tracing, monitoring, and automated recovery mechanisms.
• Ensuring auditability, traceability, reproducibility, and governance standards for compliance‑driven environments.

Requirements

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience, primarily in Python, building scalable production systems.
• Proven experience developing OCR‑based document intelligence solutions for large, long‑form PDFs (100+ pages).
• Hands‑on experience deploying and managing open‑source LLMs (e.g., LLaMA, Qwen, Mistral) using vLLM or Hugging Face TGI.
• Experience operating GPU‑backed inference infrastructure with performance optimization and cost‑efficiency strategies.
• Strong expertise in deterministic validation systems, including schema enforcement and rule‑based governance layers.
• Excellent debugging, systems thinking, and architectural decision‑making skills.
• Ability to clearly communicate technical trade‑offs and business impact to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Preferred experience with layout‑aware models (LayoutLM, DocFormer), regulated industry environments (finance, healthcare), or document‑intensive workflows such as underwriting or claims processing.