Principal AI Engineering Lead (Gen AI & MLOps) in London

Kantar is the world’s leading AI-native marketing data and analytics business and an indispensable brand partner to the world’s top companies. We combine the most meaningful attitudinal and behavioural data with deep expertise and advanced analytics to uncover how people think and act. We help clients understand what has happened and why and how to shape the marketing strategies that shape their future.

Why this job is important

AI is moving quickly but building AI that people can trust — and that works reliably at enterprise scale takes strong engineering discipline. In this role, you’ll help shape the future of our AI‑enabled enterprise platforms by bringing together AI engineering, software architecture, and data science to deliver systems that are scalable, secure, and responsibly designed. You’ll focus on turning real business needs into robust products: from designing how AI is embedded into platforms, to ensuring performance, monitoring, and governance are built in from day one. This is a principal individual-contributor role, leading through technical authority, design ownership, and mentoring rather than formal line management.

What you’ll be doing

• Leading the design and delivery of AI‑enabled enterprise platforms, from early architecture through to production.
• Building and improving applied AI solutions (including LLM-based patterns such as embeddings, retrieval approaches, and model tuning where appropriate).
• Setting engineering standards for MLOps: CI/CD, model deployment, monitoring, evaluation, and operational reliability.
• Architecting secure, cloud-native services (microservices, APIs, messaging/event-driven patterns) that support AI workloads at scale.
• Coaching engineers and collaborating across Engineering, Data Science, and Product to turn complex AI concepts into practical delivery plans.

The skills & experience needed

• Experience building, deploying, and maintaining machine learning and generative AI solutions (e.g., LLMs, embeddings, retrieval patterns, vector search, model fine‑tuning).
• Strong MLOps knowledge across continuous integration, deployment, monitoring, and evaluation of AI/ML models.
• Experience with AI infrastructure (orchestration pipelines, GPU compute, model hosting services) and scalable AI data structures (including vector databases/semantic search).
• Deep software engineering capability in .NET Core/C# and modern back-end engineering, with flexibility to work across languages such as Python, Go, or TypeScript.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, cloud-native patterns, and modern data stores (SQL and NoSQL).
• Secure coding mindset with awareness of cybersecurity risks, particularly around AI and data privacy.
• Proven technical leadership (principal engineer/tech lead/architect level), with a track record of mentoring and influencing engineering direction.

What’s in it for you (UK benefits)

• Flexible hybrid working
• 25 days leave, 2 days paid for volunteering and life event leave
• Competitive salary and bonus (bonus dependent on role)
• Company pension
• Enhanced parental leave
• Healthcare options
• Wide range of flexible benefits

We are not able to offer visa sponsorship or assist with relocation support for this role. Please ensure you have the right to work in the country where this role is located before applying. We are open to hiring in London, Porto, Bangalore, and Hyderabad for this position.

We shape the brands of tomorrow by better understanding people everywhere. By understanding people, we can understand what drives their decisions, actions, and aspirations on a global scale. And by amplifying our in-depth expertise of human understanding alongside ground-breaking technology, we can help brands find concrete insights that will help them succeed in our fast-paced, ever-shifting world.

And because we know people, we like to make sure our own people are being looked after as well. Equality of opportunity for everyone is our highest priority and we support our colleagues to work in a way that supports their health and wellbeing. While we encourage teams to spend part of their working week in the office, we understand no one size fits all; our approach is flexible to ensure everybody feels included, accepted, and that we can win together.

We’re dedicated to creating an inclusive culture and value the diversity of our people, clients, suppliers, and communities, and we encourage applications from all backgrounds and sections of society. Even if you feel like you’re not an exact match, we’d love to receive your application and talk to you about this job or others at Kantar.