Remote engineer

Location: London (Remote with occasional travel for team meetings or collaboration)

The travel should be practical and reasonably inexpensive — they don’t want someone whose commute would involve excessive time or high travel costs. The hiring manager's team is already distributed across the UK, so remote working is normal, with only occasional in-person meetups.

They are looking for candidates who have more than 5 years of experience with Technical AI and multiple stakeholders. They are only considering candidates who do not require sponsorship now or in the future.

Criteria:

• AI-Native Engineering Practice
• Software Engineering Experience
• Databricks and Python Proficiency
• Functional Empathy and Stakeholder Engagement
• Solution Ownership and Quality

We’re looking for engineers who are not only deeply technical in AI but also excellent communicators and stakeholder partners. Some engineers love technology for technology’s sake. This role is different. At HeadFirst x Impellam, we’re looking for someone who enjoys figuring things out, understands how organizations work, and gets a kick out of building solutions that genuinely improve the day-to-day reality of teams across the business.

As an Applied AI Engineer, you work directly with departments such as Finance, HR, Sales, and Marketing to streamline processes, eliminate friction, and help people work smarter through AI, automation, and lightweight internal applications. You aren’t expected to be an expert in every framework, platform, or tool from day one. What matters more is how you think, how quickly you learn, and how effectively you turn ambiguity into practical results.

This is a high-profile role that makes a real difference to the business. You’ll spend just as much time understanding workflows, challenging assumptions, and shaping solutions as you do building them. The people who thrive here are curious, pragmatic, and comfortable working closely with stakeholders rather than hiding behind tickets or isolated engineering backlogs.

Your impact:

Your role is to identify where AI, automation, or lightweight applications can deliver immediate value, and then help bring that value to life quickly and pragmatically. Rather than spending months designing perfect systems, you focus on delivering usable solutions quickly, gathering feedback early, and improving continuously. This could involve building an internal workflow tool, creating an AI-powered assistant for operational teams, or streamlining reporting and approvals through automation. You work within a modern Databricks and AI-enabled ecosystem, but technology is never the end goal.

What you will do:

• Work closely with business stakeholders to understand operational challenges, workflows, and inefficiencies;
• Translate ideas and business needs into practical tools, automations, and AI-powered solutions;
• Build lightweight internal applications that boost productivity and simplify daily work;
• Use AI coding assistants and AI-native workflows to speed up delivery and experimentation;
• Continuously refine solutions based on real user feedback and adoption;
• Support teams in improving processes rather than simply digitizing existing inefficiencies;
• Collaborate with Finance, HR, Commercial, and leadership teams on business-critical initiatives;
• Balance speed and quality by making pragmatic engineering decisions that maintain momentum;
• Introduce smarter workflows through automation, AI agents, and integrated internal tools;
• Help shape how AI is adopted responsibly and practically throughout the organization;
• Share ideas, best practices, and suggestions for improvement that help teams move faster and work more effectively.