Principal AI Engineer in Leicester

This hybrid role blends 80% hands-on technical leadership—building, deploying, and optimising AI systems across our product suite—with 20% evangelism and enablement, partnering with Marketing, Sales, and Finance to embed AI into internal processes and drive organisation-wide adoption. You will report directly to the Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTPO) and collaborate with our distributed engineering organisation (120+ engineers across the UK, USA, and India) to deliver scalable, production-grade AI integrations that elevate both user experience and internal capabilities.

You’ll lead the design, development, and deployment of advanced AI solutions, shaping innovation, establishing best practices, and ensuring the reliability and scalability of our AI systems.

• AI Product Integration (Core Focus — 80%)

• Design, build, and deploy AI‑powered features across VenturEd’s education platforms — including intelligent admissions assistants, automated decision‑support tools, payments solutions supporting over $1bn in transactions, and school communication systems.
• Develop and integrate agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph) and vector database architectures to power natural language workflows for users.
• Implement RAG pipelines, semantic search, and context‑extension frameworks to enhance LLM performance, reliability, and accuracy.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to customise and fine‑tune foundation models (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) for domain‑specific applications.
• Build and manage API configurations, guardrails, and data‑modelling layers to support secure AI deployment within sensitive educational‑data environments.
• Apply ML Ops best practices for deploying, monitoring, and iterating on AI systems in production.
• Partner with Marketing, Sales, Finance, and other internal teams to identify automation opportunities and data‑driven enhancements.
• Develop AI‑powered internal tools and workflows (using platforms like n8n, Copilot, Cursor) to boost cross‑functional productivity.
• Champion a culture of AI adoption through education, experimentation, and showcasing impactful internal use cases.

Your Impact

You’ll play a pivotal role in transforming VenturEd into an AI‑enabled EdTech powerhouse. Early impact projects include:

• Admissions Intelligence Agent — an NLP‑driven system that helps schools assess and qualify student applications more efficiently, with suggestive follow‑up actions.
• Parent Application Assistant — generative tools that guide families in strengthening their applications and discovering well‑matched institutions.

These prototypes will form the foundation of a scalable, AI‑driven ecosystem that improves how thousands of schools operate, make decisions, and engage with students and families.

What You’ll Bring

• Technical Expertise

• Deep proficiency in Python, machine learning, and modern data‑science techniques.
• Experience deploying and scaling AI systems in multi‑cloud environments (Azure preferred, with AWS exposure).
• Hands‑on experience with tools such as Azure Foundry, AWS SageMaker, or similar platforms for model deployment and experimentation.
• Proficiency with agentic frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph), vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma), and prompt‑engineering methodologies.
• Familiarity with LLM operations — fine‑tuning, context‑window extension, RAG pipelines, and model evaluation.
• Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and safety frameworks — particularly within regulated or sensitive environments (education, healthcare, public sector, etc.).
• Experience building and maintaining MLOps pipelines for CI/CD, versioning, and model‑performance monitoring.

• Strategic & Collaborative Skills

• Proven ability to bridge technical and business domains while influencing cross‑functional leaders and evangelising AI adoption.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to explain complex AI concepts to non‑technical audiences.
• A builder mindset — comfortable working autonomously, iterating quickly, and delivering production‑grade systems.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Advanced degree (MSc/PhD) in Computer Science, Data Science, or related STEM field.
• Proven experience in designing and deploying AI/ML solutions at scale.
• Strong understanding of data governance, compliance, and security in AI systems.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, with a track record of mentoring engineers.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, and model hosting.
• Demonstrated ability to drive adoption of AI tools and frameworks across large engineering teams.

Preferred Experience

• 7+ years of professional experience, with at least 3 years in applied AI/ML roles.
• Prior experience within EdTech, enterprise SaaS, or data-intensive product environments is advantageous.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, generative AI, and AI-powered product features.
• Published work or thought leadership in AI engineering.

About Us

VenturEd Solutions UK comprises of market-leading education technology companies trusted by over 18,000 school establishments. Our family of products provide customers with tangible benefits by reducing costs, offering your staff more time to focus on their priorities and working alongside your leadership teams to achieve your strategic priorities. Our suite includes communications, payments, analytics, data integration solutions, and school website design.

Why Work Here?

• Full personal membership to our private healthcare, AXA PPP
• 25 days of holiday, plus the bank holidays
• Generous paid sick leave
• Enhanced paid parental leave
• Membership to our Death in Service Insurance scheme which provides 4x your salary to your loved ones
• Generous salary sacrifice pension scheme

VenturEd Solutions is an equal opportunity employer, committed to being a successful, caring and welcoming place for all employees. We want to create a supportive and inclusive environment where our employees can reach their full potential, without prejudice and discrimination. We are committed to a culture where respect and understanding is fostered, and the diversity of people’s backgrounds and circumstances will be positively valued. We therefore treat everyone on the basis of their talent and cultural capability, and nothing else. VenturEd Solutions aims to achieve equality by removing any potential discrimination due to protected characteristics defined in the Equality Act 2010.

Additional Factors

All persons hired will be required to verify their identity, provide proof of the right to live and work in the UK, and complete and satisfy any pre‑employment checks.