Overview
The Senior Applied AI Engineer will be responsible for designing and implementing robust agentic AI systems in production environments, focusing on critical applications for defence and national security. This role involves owning the development process from architecture to deployment, working closely with a team of engineers to ensure the reliability and performance of systems under real-world conditions. The position is hybrid, requiring regular on-site work in Oxford or London, and offers a significant opportunity to impact high-stakes decision-making processes.
Responsibilities
- Build multi-agent AI systems from the ground up, employing frameworks like LangGraph or Haystack.
- Engineer production-grade systems with a focus on reliability, latency, and failure behavior.
- Integrate large language and vision-language models into reasoning, search, summarization, and task-execution pipelines.
- Deploy systems in cloud, on-premises, and fully offline environments, adhering to security and reliability standards.
- Own the full production pipeline from data ingestion to inference, ensuring accountability for system performance.
- Implement evaluation, observability, and guardrails to assess model behavior and performance under various conditions.
- Serve as a technical authority, setting design patterns and direction for other engineers.
Requirements
- Minimum of 6 years of professional software engineering experience, particularly in LLM-based or agentic systems.
- Proficiency in Python and familiarity with frameworks like LangGraph, LangChain, and Haystack.
- Experience designing and deploying AI/ML systems in production environments.
- Hands-on experience in managing large multimodal datasets (3TB+) and skilled in search and retrieval operations.
- Fluency with Docker, Git, and cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
- Understanding of secure deployment patterns, including air-gapped and sovereign cloud environments.
- Strong technical ownership skills and ability to document and transfer knowledge effectively.