Lead AI Engineer - NLP and LLM Solutions

Lead AI Engineer

Fully remote (UK based only)

£75,000 – £85,000 + bonus + private healthcare

Full time Permanent Employment

Are you looking to take technical ownership of AI systems that are already in use, while shaping how an AI function operates as it scales?

This role sits at a point where core AI capability is in place, but standards, patterns and long-term direction are still being defined. You will have the remit to influence architecture, model choices, tooling and ways of working, while remaining hands-on across delivery.

The team already includes junior AI engineers and supporting data and platform functions. This role provides technical leadership, mentoring, and clear ownership of how AI systems move from experimentation into reliable production use.

Our client builds data-driven products centred on large volumes of long-form, unstructured and noisy text-based documentation. They are expanding their AI capability and are looking for a Senior AI Engineer to lead the design, development and productionisation of NLP and LLM-based solutions.

The role

You will design, build and operate AI systems with a strong focus on processing lengthy, complex and inconsistently structured documents. The emphasis is on taking models from concept through to production, ensuring they are reliable, monitored and suitable for real-world use rather than controlled research settings.

You will work closely with AI, MLOps and Data Engineering colleagues, contributing to technical direction while maintaining direct ownership of delivery.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement NLP and LLM-based systems for products that process long, noisy and unstructured text
• Build retrieval and generation pipelines capable of working with large document sets
• Evaluate models, techniques and retrieval approaches, and make clear recommendations
• Fine-tune and adapt foundation models using domain-specific datasets
• Build and maintain evaluation, prompt testing and dataset preparation tooling
• Analyse model behaviour, performance and drift in production environments
• Work with MLOps to deploy, monitor and retrain models using robust pipelines
• Support CI/CD processes, including versioning, reproducibility and rollback

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• Mentor junior engineers and support their technical growth
• Strong experience with NLP and LLMs, including transformers, fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented approaches
• Hands-on experience building RAG systems over long-form or document-heavy data
• Experience processing large volumes of unstructured, inconsistent or noisy text
• Experience with monitoring, retraining workflows and performance tracking
• Understanding of explainability and responsible AI considerations
• Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Understanding of MLOps practices, CI/CD pipelines and model versioning

Career progression

This role acts as the Lead point for the AI team, with responsibility for standards, delivery quality and mentoring. As the team grows, the scope can expand into broader technical leadership, while remaining close to hands-on engineering.

It is 100% remote, if you are interested in hearing more then apply or send your CV to the consultant recruiting.