At a Glance
- Tasks: Design and develop AI features that tackle climate change using innovative technology.
- Company: Join South Pole, a global leader in sustainability solutions.
- Benefits: Enjoy a meaningful career with competitive pay, growth opportunities, and a supportive team.
- Other info: Be part of a diverse team dedicated to creating a sustainable future.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on the planet while working with cutting-edge AI technology.
- Qualifications: Experience in AI development and a passion for sustainability.
The predicted salary is between 72000 - 88000 £ per year.
South Pole is an energetic, global company offering comprehensive sustainability solutions and services.
With offices spanning all continents across the globe, we strive to create a sustainable society and economy that positively impacts our climate, ecosystems and developing communities.
With our solutions, we inspire and enable our customers to create value from sustainability-related activities.
Our Corporate Functions team is the “enablement engine” of South Pole.
Behind the scenes, we provide the business with world-class solutions and best practices that sustain business growth and success.
We cover key areas such as Finance, HR, Office Management, Legal, IT, Operations, etc.
If you are a smart, ambitious and dynamic professional with a strong passion to make a real difference in the fight against climate change, the below position may be right for you!
Job summary
South Pole is looking for an AI Developer to help build the intelligent layer behind our products.
You will design, build, and ship production-grade AI features: LLM-powered workflows, retrieval pipelines, and agentic tooling that turn large, messy environmental and carbon-market data into reliable answers.
This is a hands-on engineering role pitched at a medior-to-senior level.
We are open to a strong medior developer ready to step up, as well as a senior who can take a vague requirement and turn it into a tested, well-reasoned feature.
What matters is that you understand the why behind your choices - not just how to call an API, but when not to, and how to keep an AI system trustworthy, evaluated, and cost-aware in production.
Key Responsibilities
- AI Feature
Development: Design and ship LLM-powered features end to end - retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), structured extraction, summarisation, and agentic / tool-using workflows.
- Pipelines & Integration: Build robust data and inference pipelines that connect our AI layer to product back-ends, vector stores, and source systems (AQ, Salesforce, Google Workspace).
- Evaluation & Reliability: Stand up evaluation, monitoring, and guardrails so AI features are measurably accurate, safe, and stable - not just impressive in a demo.
- Performance & Cost: Optimise latency, token usage, and throughput; apply caching, batching, and model-routing to keep large workloads fast and economical.
- Quality Assurance: Champion rigorous testing and pull-request discipline to prevent regressions and keep deployments stable.
- Collaboration: Partner with the Tech Lead and product owners to translate business problems into AI solutions, and flag where a non-AI approach is the better call.
- Technical Requirements - Core Stack
- AI & Machine Learning
- LLM Engineering: Hands-on experience building with LLM APIs (e. g. Anthropic, Open AI, or Vertex AI / Gemini) - prompt design, function/tool calling, and structured outputs.
- RAG & Retrieval: Practical knowledge of embeddings, chunking, and vector search (pgvector, or a managed vector DB).
- Frameworks: Familiarity with at least one orchestration framework (Lang Chain, Llama Index, or equivalent), and comfort working without one when it's simpler.
- Evaluation: Awareness of LLM evaluation, hallucination mitigation, and basic red-teaming of AI outputs.
- Back-end & Data
- Back-end: Strong Python (Fast API / Flask / Django), with clean, testable, production-oriented code.
- Database: Solid Postgre SQL - comfortable with relations, indices, constraints, and transactions beyond basic ORM usage.
- Data: Experience handling large, high-volume datasets and streaming / batch processing.
- Systems & Cloud-Native Architecture
- Cloud: Experience with GCP (Vertex AI, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub) or a comparable cloud platform.
- Event-Driven Design: Proficiency with queues and Pub/Sub for asynchronous, event-driven workflows.
- Dev
Ops Fundamentals: Working knowledge of CI/CD workflows and containerisation (Docker; Kubernetes a plus).
- Security: Sound practices around authentication, authorisation, throttling, and handling of sensitive and proprietary data in AI workflows. Systems & Cloud-Native Architecture
- Cloud: Experience with GCP (Vertex AI, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub) or a comparable cloud platform.
- Event-Driven Design: Proficiency with queues and Pub/Sub for asynchronous, event-driven workflows.
- Dev
Ops Fundamentals: Working knowledge of CI/CD workflows and containerisation (Docker; Kubernetes a plus).
- Security: Sound practices around authentication, authorisation, throttling, and handling of sensitive and proprietary data in AI workflows.
Communication Skills
- Proficiency in business English.
- Ability to translate complex technical and AI concepts into understandable terms for non-technical business colleagues.
Desirable Requirements
- Experience with MLOps / model lifecycle tooling, or fine-tuning.
- Exposure to front-end work (React / Next. js) for AI-facing interfaces.
- Interest in climate, carbon markets, or sustainability data.
The Ideal Candidate Profile
- Proactive
Communicator: You are proactive and communicative.
In interviews you prefer a conversational approach - walking us through your reasoning and the trade-offs behind your tech choices, rather than just providing the “correct” answer.
- Pragmatic Problem Solver: You don't just make a model work once; you find the root cause, build for reliability, and know when a simpler, non-AI solution is the right one.
- Independent: You can take a high-level requirement and turn it into a fully functional, tested, evaluated feature with minimal oversight.
- Responsible by Default: You care about accuracy, safety, cost, and the trustworthiness of what you ship - a natural fit for a climate company where credibility matters.
What we offer
At South Pole, we care about our employees as much as we care about the planet.
South Pole is not just an employer, we are a Team.
South Pole does not just offer people a job, we offer you a career.
By joining our team, you will find strong purpose and deep meaning in everything you do.
You will have the chance to make a real difference for our clients and for the planet, working alongside a passionate team of like-minded colleagues, while building your knowledge/skills and developing your career in a fun, dynamic, international and fast-growing organisation.
We’re a planet of 7.5 billion unique and different people.
We all have a contribution to make and South Pole is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.
We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, marital status or disability.
Our recruitment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit and business need.
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Senior Lead, AI Engineering, GDBS in London employer: South Pole
South Pole is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work environment in London that fosters innovation and collaboration in the rapidly evolving field of carbon projects. Employees benefit from a strong commitment to professional growth, with opportunities to lead impactful initiatives while shaping the future of sustainability. The company's inclusive culture encourages diverse perspectives, ensuring that every team member's voice is heard and valued, making it a truly rewarding place to work.
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We think you need these skills to ace Senior Lead, AI Engineering, GDBS in London
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