I'm working with a large UK organisation that is making a significant investment in Applied AI and building out a senior engineering capability focused on taking AI systems from experimentation into production.
They're looking for a Principal Applied AI Engineer who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with hands‑on experience building and operating agentic AI systems.
This is a technical leadership role, but very much a hands‑on one. You'll spend the majority of your time owning complex AI projects, while also helping establish reusable tooling, design patterns and engineering standards across the wider organisation.
What you'll be doing
- Designing and delivering production‑grade AI agents and multi‑agent systems
- Owning complex AI projects from architecture through to production
- Building agent tooling, orchestration, memory/context and retrieval systems
- Working with MCP / Model Context Protocol
- Designing evaluation frameworks, golden datasets and quality metrics
- Building reusable AI components and engineering patterns
- Helping shape approaches to spec‑driven development and AI coding agents
- Providing technical leadership, mentoring and architecture guidance
What they're looking for
The biggest requirement is a strong engineering background.
You’ll ideally have:
- Strong Python/software engineering experience
- Experience shipping LLM or agentic systems into production
- Deep understanding of agent architectures and orchestration
- Strong experience with AI evaluation / evals
- Experience with MCP
- Context engineering, RAG, retrieval or memory experience
- Strong system design and architecture capability
- Experience leading technically complex projects
They're flexible on specific frameworks. LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex and similar are all relevant, but they're particularly interested in engineers who understand what's happening underneath the framework rather than relying entirely on abstractions.
Experience with AWS, regulated environments, model fine‑tuning or voice AI is useful, but not essential and other tools will be fine.
Experience using coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot or OpenCode is also valuable.
The Applied AI capability is still being built, so this isn’t a case of joining a mature function and maintaining what already exists.
You'll have genuine influence over how AI systems are engineered, evaluated and deployed across a large organisation, while working with significant data, real‑world production use cases and the resources to build things properly.
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Principal Applied AI Engineer employer: Zebra People | B Corp
Zebra People is an exceptional employer that fosters a collaborative and innovative work culture, perfect for those passionate about AI and technology. With a strong emphasis on employee growth, you will have access to continuous learning opportunities and the chance to lead a talented team in a flexible environment, balancing office presence with remote work. Located in a vibrant area, the company offers unique advantages such as networking opportunities and a supportive community, making it an ideal place for meaningful and rewarding employment.
