Applied AI Engineer

Location: London, hybrid - 1 day per week in the office

Work Type: Permanent

We're hiring Applied AI Engineers to join an AI-native business that is going through a serious period of growth. The company is only around 12 months into its journey, has already surpassed $10m ARR, has four AI products in market and another four being developed. The ambition is to build a $1bn business within the next seven years. What makes the opportunity different is the combination of a startup environment with the backing and customer access of a global enterprise software business. You'll have the freedom to build quickly, make decisions and own problems, whilst having access to major enterprise customers, real operational data and the opportunity to see what you build deployed into production. The problems are complex and genuinely real-world, spanning industries including manufacturing, aerospace & defence, energy, utilities, telecommunications and industrial asset management.

Responsibilities:

• You'll work directly with customers to understand difficult operational problems and personally build AI solutions to solve them.
• Your day-to-day will include:
• Building Applied AI products from initial idea and prototype through to production
• Designing and developing LLM and Agentic AI systems
• Working directly with customers and end users to understand the problem behind the requirement
• Building prototypes with customers, gathering feedback and iterating quickly
• Creating and maintaining evals to understand whether AI systems genuinely work
• Making pragmatic decisions across models, RAG, agents, workflows and traditional software
• Thinking about reliability, latency, cost, guardrails, observability and failure modes
• Turning successful customer solutions into scalable products
• Owning problems end to end rather than waiting for perfectly defined requirements
• Explaining complex technical decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Required Skills:

• We're looking for strong Software Engineers who have moved deeply into Applied AI and can demonstrate what they've actually shipped. You'll ideally bring:
• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Strong Python and/or TypeScript
• Commercial experience building with LLMs and Applied AI
• Experience building Agentic AI applications and/or LLM-powered products
• Experience taking AI products beyond POC and into production
• Practical experience with AI evaluation and measuring the quality of non-deterministic systems
• Cloud infrastructure and CI/CD experience
• Experience working directly with customers or non-technical stakeholders
• The ability to explain technically complex solutions in simple terms
• A product mindset and experience across the full journey from customer problem through to production

The specific frameworks you've used aren't particularly important. What matters is being able to explain what you built, why you made the decisions you did, how you evaluated whether it worked and what changed for the user as a result.

Why should I apply?

This is an opportunity for someone who wants more ownership than you'd typically get within a larger engineering organisation, without giving up the scale of problems you get to solve. You'll join a small, high-calibre team where there is very little ego, very little bureaucracy and engineers are trusted to make decisions. You won't spend your time building AI demos that never leave a POC. You'll work directly with customers, understand genuine problems, build the solution and see the impact in real production environments. The company has already proved the initial 0 to 1 journey. The next phase is about going 1 to 10, scaling the products, building new ones and maintaining the engineering standards and culture that got them this far. If you live and breathe AI, enjoy solving ambiguous problems and want to be surrounded by people who will challenge you technically, this is worth a conversation.