Lead AI Engineer (UK Remote) in Newcastle upon Tyne

TalentCo are delighted to be working with an AI startup looking to hire a high-calibre Lead AI Engineer into their growing engineering team in the UK, having recently closed a significant seed funding round. This is a senior individual contributor hire and can be based remote-first anywhere in the UK, for this London HQ'd startup.

You will drive the technical evolution of the clients AI-first platform and serve as their resident AI expert. You will be a core software engineer architecting the complex systems that make AI useful in production, splitting your time between crafting complex AI processing architectures and hands-on data/backend engineering, with the rest spent doing whatever is needed to ship.

As Lead AI Engineer you will:

• Architect & Engineer AI Systems: You won’t just call an API; you will build robust processing architectures that leverage off-the-shelf LLMs, RAG pipelines, and context engineering to solve hard problems. You will benchmark these systems rigorously to ensure they actually work, not just "feel" smart.
• Build the Backend Foundation: You will spend significant time in Python (FastAPI, SQLAlchemy) building the APIs, data structures, and services that power the product. You are an engineer who ensures the "AI" is delivered on reliable, production-grade rails.
• Close the Data Loop: As we launch, you will lead the transition from "zero-shot" implementations to data-driven optimisation. You will instrument data collection, design online evaluation metrics, and deploy simple, effective ML models (e.g., logistic regression, boosted trees) to optimise user outcomes based on real feedback.
• Mentor & Lead: You will work alongside full-stack engineers, upskilling the team on AI concepts and best practices. You are the "from-the-trenches" expert who helps the team distinguish between Twitter hype and engineering reality.
• Strategically Advise: You will help Product and Leadership navigate the map of what’s valuable and what’s possible, steering the roadmap toward features that achieve business impact through data-driven optimisation.

We want to hear from you if you bring:

• Production Engineering (5+ years): You are a strong software engineer first. You have extensive experience building and maintaining backend services in Python (ideally FastAPI or similar async frameworks) deployed to modern cloud providers (GCP/AWS) or point solutions (Railway, Render, Vercel).
• Applied AI Architecture: You have built complex applications using Foundation Models / LLMs. You understand context window management, prompting strategies, and how to chain models together to achieve reliable results.
• Team-Oriented Mindset: Strong communication skills for explaining complex ideas to technical and non-technical audiences, and a passion for collaborating within cross-functional teams.
• Passion and Pride in Shipping: A do-whatever-it-takes attitude to deliver against important business goals that help the entire team win.
• Pragmatic Best Practices: An overarching desire to build efficient, scalable, and maintainable code, while managing the tradeoffs between technical debt and delivery speed. You’d rather ship a heuristic that solves the user's problem today than a perfect model two weeks late.

What do they offer?

• Base salary c£150k
• Remote-first with occasional trips to the London HQ to see the team
• Apple devices and the best AI tooling
• Meaningful early-stage share opportunities
• Career rocket fuel - real growth, real ownership, real impact