Software Engineer AI in Grimsby

Software Engineer specialising in AI based in Grimsby, with a salary of £70k to £80k per annum. Principal IT is working exclusively with a leading financial organisation looking to begin their AI development function in-house.

If you are looking for a role where you can really road map a company's AI strategy and implementation, then this is the role for you. You will be the company's first specific hire in this space and will be involved in:

• First-mover impact: shape the foundations (ways of working, standards, tooling) that future AI hires will build on.
• Strategic importance: AI is viewed as central to the company’s growth strategy, with this role forming the basis for further investment.
• High ownership: influence outcomes and help shape the AI roadmap.
• Cross-functional exposure: work day-to-day with business stakeholders and partner closely with the engineering team to ship production systems.
• Paired delivery model: you will be partnered with a Product Manager who will lead the AI project; you’ll be the technical counterpart, shaping solution design, feasibility, delivery approach, and production readiness.
• Production-first: build, harden, and operate systems in a regulated environment.
• Greenfield + stewardship: deliver a new AI solution while keeping existing solutions healthy.

Who this role is for:

• A pragmatic builder who ships and iterates in production.
• A strong communicator who can run discovery and manage tradeoffs with stakeholders.
• An engineer comfortable owning end-to-end delivery (data → model → app → monitoring).

Core responsibilities:

• Partner closely with the AI Product Manager to translate business goals into an executable technical plan (scope, milestones, tradeoffs).
• Maintain and improve existing AI solutions (reliability, evals, monitoring, safe releases).
• Design and deliver a new AI solution end-to-end (discovery → MVP → production rollout).
• Build/maintain evaluation and observability tooling (quality, drift, safety, performance).
• Partner with AF SMEs, engineering, security, and compliance to ship safely.
• Document and hand over systems so they can be operated long-term.
• Upskill and enable the wider team in effective AI usage (AI-assisted coding practices, patterns for AI/LLM solutions, and pragmatic guardrails) through pairing, lightweight training, and shared standards.

Key requirements:

• 6+ years building and shipping software; meaningful experience delivering ML/LLM systems to production.
• Strong Python + software engineering fundamentals (testing, code quality, CI/CD).
• Experience with modern LLM patterns (RAG, tool use/agents, fine-tuning or prompt systems) and robust evaluation.
• Practical experience operating production systems on-prem or in a private cloud (Linux, containers, networking, monitoring/ops).
• The company runs on-prem infrastructure — public cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) experience is welcome but not required; what matters is transferable ops fundamentals.
• Strong stakeholder communication and ability to work with ambiguous requirements.
• Experience mentoring/enablement: helping other engineers and business stakeholders adopt new tooling and ways of working (especially AI-assisted development).

Nice to have:

• Experience in financial services / regulated environments.
• Experience with data engineering pipelines and feature stores.
• Experience with multimodal models or speech/voice workflows.

Not a fit for:

• Engineers looking for a heavily guided, junior role.
• Engineers who prefer minimal stakeholder interaction.
• Engineers who optimise for theoretical elegance over shipping value.

You will be required to be on site a minimum of 2 days per week, with a basic salary of £70k to £80k depending on experience, plus 24 days holiday and bank holidays.

If you would like to discuss this role further, you can do so by contacting Principal IT directly or by applying via the link below.