Software Engineer - Data & AI in Woking

Working within the Data & AI capability team, this role designs, builds, and operates full-stack, AI-enabled software, with a strong frontend focus. You build the user-facing products and interfaces that make McLaren's data and AI usable: chat experiences, engineering assistants, dashboards, and internal digital products, backed by the AI platforms. You will work in a product-oriented delivery model, embedded in or allocated to a business-aligned product team (Product Development, Manufacturing, or Commercial), drawing on shared capabilities from the unified platform team. You sit at a valuable intersection where you build both the polished front-end users interact with and the AI integration layer behind it (streaming LLM responses, RAG, agents), deploying on the cloud infrastructure that runs them.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and maintain responsive, accessible, high-performance web applications and AI-enabled interfaces, including chat UIs, streaming responses, dashboards, and interactive tools.
• Build AI-enabled UX that is transparent and trustworthy: token-by-token streaming, source citations, confidence indicators, human-in-the-loop review and correction, safety warnings, and graceful error/fallback states.
• Integrate frontends with the McLaren AI platforms, handle streaming, token limits, rate limits, and retries.
• Build and maintain backend services and APIs that support AI-powered features and connect to data products and source systems.
• Deliver data and AI products through the lifecycle, from POC and proof of integration (POI) to MVP and production, connecting cleanly to source systems and downstream consumers at every integration boundary.
• Own the infrastructure your services run on: infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, containerisation, and observability and deployment.
• Contribute to AI evaluation and quality: build and run automated evals and regression tests and use observability tooling to track latency, token usage, and failure modes.
• Apply governance and security as code: ownership, access controls, lineage, quality checks, auth, least privilege, and encryption, scaled by product maturity.
• Champion McLaren-controlled infrastructure and data residency by default and drive adoption of AI tools.
• Plan and deliver work in agile sprints, balancing exploratory R&D with production-grade delivery. Give honest estimates and flag scope risk early.

What You'll Bring

• Python (FastAPI), Node.js, REST APIs.
• SQL and PostgreSQL.
• Redis/Valkey for session and WebSocket coordination at scale.
• Strong JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML5, CSS.
• React (or equivalent), component architecture, state management.
• Responsive design, web performance (Core Web Vitals: LCP/INP/CLS).
• Git-based workflows and CI/CD.
• PHP, MS SQL Server, Matlab, for transitional support and migration only.
• Rust for performance-critical components.
• Fine-tuning (LoRA/PEFT), multimodal models.
• Familiarity with the AWS GenAI-on-EKS pattern (LiteLLM + vector DB + Langfuse via Terraform/Helm).
• Data visualisation; design-tool literacy (Figma).

What We'll Do for You

• We offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:
• Structured career development framework.
• 25 days’ holiday, plus bank holiday.
• Annual buy & sell up to five days.
• Enhanced company pension scheme.
• Discretionary annual bonus award.
• Private medical insurance and health cash plan.
• Life assurance benefit.
• Ability to apply for a sabbatical of up to one year after only two years’ service.
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping.
• Generous parental leave policies.
• A range of wellbeing initiatives, such as employee assistance programme and free financial & mortgage advice.

Who Are We?

No restraints. No limitations. We don’t simply push boundaries. We completely rethink them. McLaren Automotive exists to create breath-taking performance road cars. It takes a community to do what we do. A diverse group of people with many areas of expertise, united by their passion to deliver visionary products and set new benchmarks. McLaren Automotive commits to equal opportunity for all. Diversity, Equality and Inclusion is at the heart of our impact, it drives our innovation and enables us to truly create something special. Join us on our journey.