Head of AI Engineering in Sheffield

A founder-led B2B consultancy bringing professional brand strategy and applied AI engineering to UK SMEs is hiring a founding Head of AI Engineering. Effectively, the second person in the business and the technical owner of a portfolio of agentic services supporting clients’ brand, marketing and commercial functions.

This is a hands-on build-and-lead role for someone who wants to set the engineering direction of a consultancy from day one. You will partner closely with the founder to shape architecture, standards and the agent portfolio that sits at the heart of the client offer.

The business is a brand strategy consultancy with AI engineering at its core and not an AI lab dressed up as an agency. The right candidate will understand that engineering quality only matters when it serves brand and commercial outcomes for the SMEs the business exists to serve.

What you will be doing

• You will lead the design, build and operational delivery of production AI agents for client brand and marketing functions, owning the work from architecture through to live performance.
• Own the architecture, build and deployment of bespoke AI agents that solve real commercial, brand and marketing problems for SME clients.
• Define reusable agent patterns, orchestration frameworks and integration standards across the portfolio.
• Lead production operations; observability, evaluation, cost optimisation, latency tuning and incident response in client environments.
• Establish engineering standards covering code quality, testing, documentation, security and deployment practice.
• Build and maintain the evaluation infrastructure that proves our agents perform, and keep performing, in live commercial use.
• Implement appropriate governance around UK GDPR, AI risk, model safety and responsible deployment.
• Work closely with the founder on technical strategy, platform decisions, hiring and roadmap.

About you

You are an experienced engineer with a strong record of shipping LLM-based and agentic systems into commercial production. You are comfortable being the senior technical voice in a small, fast-moving business and you balance engineering rigour with commercial pragmatism.

You will bring:

• 5+ years of commercial software engineering experience, including 2+ years dedicated to production LLM-based or agentic AI systems.
• Strong Python, with working competence in TypeScript or JavaScript for integrations and services.
• Hands-on experience with modern agent orchestration using LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, the OpenAI Agents SDK, or equivalent. Familiarity with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a plus.
• Production experience with RAG patterns. Chunking, retrieval, reranking, hybrid search, query rewriting and the trade-offs involved should all be familiar to you.
• Experience integrating frontier LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and SaaS platforms into observable, cost-controlled production systems.
• Working knowledge of vector databases (e.g. Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, pgvector) and embedding model selection.
• Demonstrable experience with LLM evaluation using eval design, golden datasets, regression testing, and tools such as LangSmith, Braintrust or similar.
• Comfort with the operational realities of production AI: latency, cost, model routing, fallbacks, prompt versioning and observability.
• A clear, evidence-led communication style with low tolerance for hype or vague claims.
• Existing UK right to work, and willingness to travel periodically within Northern England.

Useful additional experience:

• Workflow automation platforms such as n8n, Make or Zapier (treated as integration glue, not primary engineering tooling).
• Cloud-hosted AI services such as AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI or Vertex AI.
• Containerisation and CI/CD for AI workloads.
• Fine-tuning, adapter approaches or model distillation where commercially justified.
• A background in, or genuine interest in, brand strategy, marketing or consultancy.

Evidence we will look for

This role expects verifiable production experience, not theoretical exposure or experimentation. As part of the process you'll walk through specific systems you have personally built, owned and operated in a collaborative technical conversation.

You should be able to demonstrate:

• AI agents or LLM-based systems you have personally shipped to production within the last 24 months.
• Real users, customers or paying clients relying on those systems in a live commercial setting.
• Your personal ownership of the work end-to-end from architecture, build and deployment to monitoring and post-launch iteration.
• The technical and commercial decisions you owned including trade-offs around quality, reliability, cost, latency and risk.

Supporting evidence: repositories, deployed products, case studies, talks, technical writing or other public artefacts of shipped engineering.

Culture fit

The business exists to bring professional brand strategy and applied AI engineering to the UK SME market that has historically been priced out of both. This role will suit someone motivated by building the right thing for the right reason, not by shipping AI for the sake of it.

You are likely to fit well if you are:

• Strategy-first in your thinking. You use AI to deliver brand and commercial outcomes, not as an end in itself.
• Evidence-based in your approach. You default to evaluation, measurement and structured testing rather than opinion or vibes.
• Client-focused. You understand engineering decisions have to work for real businesses operating under real constraints.
• Ethically grounded. You take responsible AI, data privacy, transparency and model risk seriously, and you are willing to push back when commercial pressure conflicts with that.
• Comfortable with ownership, ambiguity and pace, and able to make sound decisions without being managed.

What is on offer

You will join an early-stage, founder-led consultancy with a clear point of view on where brand strategy and applied AI intersect. You will own the engineering function from day one and play a defining role in shaping the technical capability of the business.

The package includes:

• Salary in the region of c.£70,000 depending on experience.
• Profit share scheme aligned to business performance.
• Equity opportunity after a qualifying period, with full terms shared at offer stage.
• Pension and 25 days’ holiday plus bank holidays.
• Remote-first working with periodic UK travel for client engagements and team time.
• Direct access to the founder and a flat decision-making structure without committees or theatre.