AI Data Engineer in London

At Zenith UK, we believe that fostering an inclusive culture where all talent can thrive makes our company stronger. It enables a greater idea exchange, which fosters innovation and creativity, and enriches our perspective. We are committed to Publicis Groupe’s wide variety of talent engagement and inclusion programming, and encourage our people to take an active role in continuing to drive positive change within our agency.

This role presents an opportunity to engage deeply with MLOps, vector databases, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. If you are passionate about shaping the future of AI and thrive on complex, high-impact challenges, we encourage you to apply.

What You'll Do:

• Design and Build Scalable Data Pipelines: Architect, implement, and optimize robust, high-performance real-time and batch ETL pipelines to ingest, process, and transform massive datasets for LLMs and foundational AI models.
• Cloud-Native Innovation: Leverage your deep expertise across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP to build cloud-native data solutions, ensuring efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
• Power Generative AI: Develop and manage specialized data flows for generative AI applications, including integrating with vector databases and constructing sophisticated RAG pipelines.
• Champion Data Governance & Ethical AI: Implement best practices for data quality, lineage, privacy, and security, ensuring our AI systems are developed and used responsibly and ethically.
• Tooling the Future: Get hands-on with cutting-edge technologies like Hugging Face, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, and other modern data and ML frameworks.
• Collaborate and Lead: Partner closely with ML Engineers, Data Scientists, and Researchers to understand their data needs, provide technical leadership, and translate complex requirements into actionable data strategies.
• Optimize and Operate: Monitor, troubleshoot, and continuously optimize data pipelines and infrastructure for peak performance and reliability in production environments.

What You'll Bring:

We are seeking a seasoned professional who is excited by the unique challenges of AI data.

Must-Have Skills:

• Extensive Data Engineering Experience: Proven track record (3+ years) in designing, building, and maintaining large-scale data pipelines and data warehousing solutions.
• Cloud Platform Mastery: Expert-level proficiency with at least one major cloud provider (GCP-Preferred, AWS, or Azure), including their data, compute, and storage services.
• Programming Prowess: Strong programming skills in Python and SQL are essential.
• Big Data Ecosystem Expertise: Hands-on experience with big data technologies like Apache Spark, Kafka, and data orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow or Prefect.
• ML Data Acumen: Solid understanding of data requirements for machine learning models, including feature engineering, data validation, and dataset versioning.
• Vector Database Experience: Practical experience working with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Milvus, Chroma) for embedding storage and retrieval.
• Generative AI Familiarity: Understanding of data paradigms for LLMs, RAG architectures, and how data pipelines support fine-tuning or pre-training.
• MLOps Principles: Familiarity with MLOps best practices for deploying and managing ML models in production.
• Data Governance & Ethics: Experience implementing data governance frameworks, ensuring data quality, privacy, and compliance, with an awareness of ethical AI considerations.

Bonus Points If You Have:

• Direct experience with Hugging Face ecosystem, PyTorch, or TensorFlow for data preparation in an ML context.
• Experience with real-time data streaming architectures.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related quantitative field.

Zenith UK has fantastic benefits on offer to all of our employees, full details of which are shared when you join. This includes the classics like Pension, Life Assurance, Private Medical, as well as Reflection Days, Shared Parental Leave, and spans other initiatives.

At Zenith UK, we are proud to be an equal opportunities employer. We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, and do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or belief, disability, age, citizenship, relationship status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other protected characteristic. We are committed to providing a fair, accessible, and inclusive recruitment process. If you have any access needs - for example, related to disability, neurodivergence, or a health condition - please let us know. We’ll work with you to ensure the process works for you. Sharing this information will never impact your application.

Guided by our values, we listen with empathy, uplift each other, take responsibility, and embrace change - building a culture where everyone feels seen, respected, and genuinely included.