Principal Engineer AI/ML in London

Are you experienced in AI/ML engineering and technical leadership? We have a great opportunity for you – Principal Engineer (AI/ML)! Careers at TCS: It means more. TCS is a purpose‑led transformation company built on belief. It does not just help businesses transform through technology – it supports them in making a meaningful difference to the people and communities they serve. For you, it means making an impact that matters, through challenging projects demanding ambitious innovation and thought leadership.

Tackle complex, ambiguous technical challenges with a proactive and solution‑focused mindset. Strive for engineering excellence and deliver impactful outcomes at scale. Collaborate and contribute within a dynamic, high‑performing engineering environment.

The Role: As a Principal Engineer (AI/ML), you will work closely with data scientists, engineers and product managers to design, build, deploy and operate robust machine‑learning systems that power key services across Digital and Retail platforms. The role focuses strongly on MLOps and ML platform engineering, enabling scalable, production‑ready ML workflows using modern cloud infrastructure and tooling. You will provide technical leadership, influence engineering strategy and help establish best practices across teams.

Your responsibilities:

• Set technical direction by defining architecture principles, design patterns and engineering standards.
• Design, develop and maintain ML pipelines for training, validation, deployment and monitoring.
• Support scalable ML solutions across use cases such as recommendations, forecasting and automation.
• Automate model deployment and lifecycle management using CI/CD pipelines.
• Improve the reliability, observability and performance of ML platforms.
• Collaborate closely with data scientists to productionise research models into scalable services.
• Implement monitoring, alerting and model‑drift detection using platform and custom tooling.
• Continuously improve infrastructure using containerisation, cloud services and infrastructure as code.
• Mentor engineers across levels and help grow technical capability, autonomy and best‑practice adoption.
• Work closely with stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical roadmaps and solutions.

Your Profile: Essential skills/knowledge/experience:

• Proven experience in ML Engineering, DevOps or Data Engineering with exposure to the full ML lifecycle.
• Hands‑on experience building and maintaining ML workflows or pipelines in production environments.
• Strong Python skills, with experience using ML frameworks such as MLflow, Scikit‑learn or PyTorch.
• Experience working with cloud platforms, particularly Azure or AWS.
• Solid understanding of containerisation (Docker) and orchestration platforms (e.g. Kubernetes).
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps.
• Exposure to infrastructure‑as‑code tools such as Terraform.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across teams.
• Proven experience operating in a senior or principal engineering role within a modern technology organisation.
• Demonstrated ability to influence engineering strategy and shape technical direction across multiple teams.
• Experience partnering with senior engineering managers and technical leaders to guide delivery and vision.
• Experience working with data platforms such as Snowflake or Azure Data Lake.
• Experience deploying models as APIs using FastAPI or Azure Functions.
• Knowledge of monitoring, model‑performance tracking and observability best practices.
• Familiarity with orchestration tools such as Airflow or Azure Data Factory.
• Strong advocate for Agile methodologies and modern engineering practices.
• Ability to build inclusive, collaborative relationships across engineering communities.
• Comfortable making data‑driven decisions and evaluating technical trade‑offs at scale.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers at all levels and strengthening engineering culture.
• Passion for innovation, continuous improvement and enabling others to succeed.

TCS is consistently voted a Top Employer in the UK and globally. Our competitive salary packages feature pension, health care, life assurance, laptop, phone, access to extensive training resources and discounts within the larger Tata network.

Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing: Tata Consultancy Services UK&I is committed to meeting the accessibility needs of all individuals in accordance with the UK Equality Act 2010 and the UK Human Rights Act 1998. We welcome and embrace diversity in race, nationality, ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity, gender identity, age, physical ability, gender reassignment and sexual orientation. We are a disability inclusive employer and encourage disabled people to apply for this role. As a Disability Confident Employer, we offer an interview to applicants with disabilities or long‑term conditions who meet the minimum criteria for the role.

Join us and do more of what matters. Apply online now.