Sr. Tech Lead - AI & Software Engg in London

The Principal AI Engineer will join a vibrant team of Data Scientists and ML Engineers working with the Trading & Supply Capability Center (CC) within the IT Digital Engineering VPship. As the Principal AI Engineer, you will be responsible for initiating, developing and deploying GenAI solutions/products in an agile fashion to meet demand across multiple business lines. You will also be accountable for adhering to Shell quality standards for producing digital solutions.

What we need from you:

• Lead the technical direction of GenAI focused projects and initiatives.
• Mentor junior AI engineers and help software engineers upskill on GenAI relevant techniques and tools.
• Work within the Data Science and ML team to build and deploy GenAI solutions to production, using existing and emerging methods and technologies that could be effectively applied to Shell use cases.
• Build core infrastructure around feature engineering, model training, model deployment, ongoing monitoring tools, and much more.
• Build and define key evaluation systems and processes to ensure GenAI Tooling performs at a high standard.
• Help guide and define strategic ambitions relevant to GenAI tooling and projects.
• Work closely with Infrastructure, data engineering and DevOps teams to increase deployment velocity, including the process for deploying tools into production.
• Work closely with Product Management to translate product requirements into robust, customer-agnostic machine learning architecture.
• Keep abreast of new engineering practices, technologies and continuously improve our Agile practices while building and strengthening relationships and alliances in academia, IDT and industry.
• Contribute to community building initiatives like CoE, CoP.

What you’ll bring:

• Bachelor’s/Master’s/PHD degree in Engineering, statistics, machine learning, computational linguistics or relevant areas.
• Proven years of experience in industry.
• Solid experience in delivery of GenAI products with an opinion on how best to deliver each phase of the life cycle.
• Proven years of development competency across a variety of languages, frameworks, and tooling, such as Python, R, Kubernetes, Kubeflow, JavaScript/JVM, Kafka.
• Proven years of experience in designing, developing, deploying, and monitoring machine learning and GenAI solutions.
• Exposure in Application development, deployment, and monitoring on Kubernetes.
• Significant years of experience working with data scientists and/or ML engineers and building auto-scaling ML systems.
• Proficient in PyTorch or similar frameworks (e.g. Tensorflow) – demonstrates strong understanding of neural networks and LLMs; familiar with frameworks widely used in Hugging Face models, LLaMA, and similar architectures.
• Expertise in fine-tuning methodologies – including data collection strategies for effective model adaptation (embeddings included).
• Deep knowledge of LLM architectures and attention mechanisms – experienced with MoE, MHA, SWA, Flash Attention, GPT, LLaMA, DeepSeek, and reasoning-based models.
• Inference optimisation experience – hands-on with high-performance inference frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT, and related acceleration techniques.
• Proven evaluation experience – successfully conducted assessments of RAG and agentic systems, both on performance and compliance (harm, guardrails, etc).
• Active in various AI communities relevant to the newest technology and implementation patterns.
• Strong desire to stay ahead of industry trends & technologies with a commitment to continuous learning.
• Experience in creating and maintaining RAG supported systems including PDF extraction, OCR, and varying chunking and embedding methodologies.
• Strong communication skills, especially explaining technical concepts to businesspeople & collaborating in a multi-disciplinary team (stakeholder management).
• Experience working in small, empowered, delivery focused, cross-functional and collaborating teams.

Nice to have Skills:

• Cloud.
• Commodity Trading Expertise – Short-term and physical trading across energy commodities (oil, gas, power, renewables, and related derivatives).
• Risk - Modelling & understanding of risk & risk management.
• Commodity Modelling - Energy (power, gas, environmental products) and meteorology.
• Data engineering skills using Azure/AWS/Google cloud native tools.
• Good experience in Bash/Powershell Scripting and Linux Operating system and networking fundamentals.
• Front end application development.

What we offer:

• You bring your skills and experience to Shell and in return you work with talented, committed people on one of the most important challenges facing our planet.
• You’ll have the opportunity to develop the skills you need to grow in an environment where we value honesty, integrity, and respect for one another.
• You’ll be able to balance your priorities as you become the best version of yourself.
• Progress as a person as we work on the energy transition together.
• Continuously grow the transferable skills you need to get ahead.
• Work at the forefront of technology, trends, and practices.
• Collaborate with experienced colleagues with unique expertise.
• Achieve your balance in a value-led culture that encourages you to be the best version of yourself.
• Benefit from a range of flexible working options.
• Perform at your best with a competitive starting salary and annual performance related salary increase – our pay and benefits packages are considered to be among the best in the world.
• Take advantage of paid parental leave, including for non-birthing parents.
• Join an organisation working to become one of the most diverse and inclusive in the world.
• Grow as you progress through diverse career opportunities in national and international teams.
• Gain access to a wide range of training and development programmes.

We are committed to attracting a broader and more diverse pool of candidates. If this position doesn’t feel like the perfect fit for your qualifications right now, we’d still love to hear from you. Shell is working to advance an inclusive, psychologically safe and accessible environment where people with disabilities can excel. If you require any accommodations or accessibility adjustments during the application or interview process, please let us know when prompted in your application. We strive to ensure that our process and workplace is accessible to everyone and are dedicated to making reasonable adjustments to support your needs.