AI Engineer

Music is Universal. It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.

Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation. We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards, including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition, please email UniversalMusicCareers@umusic.com.

Department: Part of the Global Technology organization, the team’s mission is to design and build state of the art AI/ML tools to support and empower Royalty Manager & Artists, and industry professionals. The team covers the full design & development lifecycle, from explorative research to design to prototypes to production scale programs. It typically undertakes programs with applications such as, but not limited to, royalty calculations, income claim, contract agreements, search, recommendation, etc. We are curious, passionate and committed to push the envelope in AI for music. If you are excited at the idea of working on state-of-the-art AI at industry scale and make an impact, we want to hear from you!

The Role: We’re looking for an AI Engineer to build and ship machine learning and generative AI solutions that power how a modern music company operates across A&R insights, marketing optimization, audience growth, content operations, rights/royalty workflows, and creative tools. You’ll partner with product, engineering, data, legal, and business teams to take ideas from prototype to production, with a strong focus on reliability, safety, and measurable impact.

Key Responsibilities

• Be Technical: Design and implement AI pipelines for automating royalty calculation and relation processes etc. Integrate foundation models (LLMs, vision models, etc.) into products using APIs and custom fine-tuning. Develop and maintain retrieval systems that operate efficiently at scale. Explore frontier software engineering in AI/ML for media, and related opportunities for UMG. Build on state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure.
• Be Collaborative: Collaborate with the team and stakeholders to deliver, operate and maintain products. Be part of an innovative and dynamic team.

Skills And Experience Required

• Must have a background in Computer Science, Software Engineering, ML Ops, Artificial Intelligence or related technical field.
• 5+ years of hands-on professional experience in software/ML engineering.
• Proven ability to come up with designs for AI/ML systems, pipelines and/or applications, and to implement them successfully.
• Expertise in quantitative evaluation and benchmarking of state of the art AI models.
• Up to date knowledge of state of the art for ML Ops, ML infrastructure, including related tools, design patterns, best practices etc.
• Experience with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, FAISS, Milvus, Weaviate) and information retrieval systems and methods.
• Familiarity with media content (video, audio) ML pipelines.
• Proficiency in Python and common AI/ML libraries (e.g., PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain) and cloud frameworks (VertexAI, Bedrock, Sagemaker).
• Strong proficiency in Git, CI/CD workflows, and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Proficiency with Linux environments and cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud Platform).
• Ability to write clean, efficient, well documented, and reusable code.
• Good communication skills, both oral and written.
• Curious, self-motivated, and proactive.

Nice to have

• Experience training and/or fine-tuning AI models.
• Experience with LLMs integration, fine-tuning and associated tools (e.g. LangChain, Agent frameworks).
• Competency in at least one other programming language (e.g. C/C++, Java).
• Experience going from POC to production-grade system.

Key Behaviours

• Curious Innovator: You stay up to date with frontier AI technologies and enjoy experimenting with fresh ideas that push the boundaries, running experiments, and learning fast from results.
• Ownership Mindset: You take initiative, follow through on challenges, and bring a sense of accountability to everything you build.
• Pragmatic Problem Solver: You balance technical depth with real-world practicality — delivering elegant, efficient and robust solutions that get the job done.
• Collaborative Builder: You thrive in cross-functional teams, translating complex AI concepts into simple, impactful solutions that empower others.
• Culturally Connected: You have a genuine interest in music and the role of technology in supporting culture.

About UMG UK: We are Universal Music Group UK – the UK’s leading music-based entertainment company. We exist to shape culture through the power of artistry. We help UK artists produce, distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music to inspire and entertain fans at home and around the world.

Bonus Tracks: Your Benefits

• Group Personal Pension Scheme (between 3% and 9%)
• Private Medical Insurance
• 25 paid days of annual leave
• Interest Free Season Ticket Loan
• Holiday Purchase scheme
• Dental and Travel Insurance options
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Salary Sacrifice Cars
• Subsidised Gym Membership
• Employee Discounts (Reward Gateway)

Just So You Know: The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder's specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.