Applied AI Engineer

Applied AI Engineer – C#/.NET & Generative AI Central Nottingham | Hybrid – 3 days onsite per week | Up to £70,000 DOE Important – please read before applying To be considered for this role, you must have hands-on commercial experience implementing LLM / Generative AI functionality into a live software product. This means more than using Copilot, ChatGPT or AI tooling to support software development. We are specifically looking for engineers who have personally designed, built and shipped AI-enabled product functionality using technologies such as LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector search/databases, agents or orchestration frameworks. If your AI experience is limited to personal projects, proof-of-concepts or developer productivity tools, this role is unlikely to be suitable. The opportunity Our client is an established software business investing heavily in the next generation of its product suite. As part of that investment, they are building out an Applied AI engineering capability focused on introducing meaningful Generative AI functionality into real commercial software used by customers. This is not an AI research role and it is not simply about connecting an application to an LLM API. They need a strong software engineer who understands how to take AI functionality from an idea through to production-quality product engineering. You will work on genuine customer problems, combining traditional software engineering with modern AI techniques to build functionality that is useful, reliable, secure and commercially viable. What you'll be doing You will design, build and deliver AI-enabled functionality within established software products, working closely with Product, Engineering and other technical stakeholders. Your work could include:

• Building Generative AI and LLM-powered product features
• Developing RAG and retrieval-based solutions
• Working with embeddings, vector search and knowledge retrieval
• Designing agentic or orchestrated AI workflows
• Integrating commercial LLM APIs into .NET applications
• Building APIs and backend services using C#/.NET
• Evaluating model behaviour, accuracy and reliability
• Reducing hallucination and improving grounding
• Designing appropriate guardrails and validation
• Considering security, observability, scalability and cost
• Taking AI functionality from prototype through to production
• Contributing to architecture and engineering standards
• Working alongside Product to determine where AI genuinely adds value What we're looking for Essential:
• Strong commercial C#/.NET software engineering experience
• Demonstrable experience building and deploying LLM / Generative AI functionality into a commercial product
• Clear understanding of how LLM-powered systems behave in production
• Experience integrating LLM APIs into applications or backend services
• Strong API and software design experience
• Ability to explain what you personally designed and coded within an AI solution We would particularly like to speak with engineers who have worked with some combination of:
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Embeddings
• Vector databases or vector search
• LLM orchestration
• AI agents
• Prompt engineering
• Model evaluation
• Structured outputs
• Grounding and citation
• Hallucination mitigation
• AI security / guardrails Experience across modern frontend technologies such as React, Angular, Next.js or TypeScript would also be useful, although the strongest requirement is the combination of .NET engineering + genuine production AI experience. What good looks like The ideal person will be able to clearly explain: What AI functionality they built, why it was needed, how the architecture worked, which models/tools were used, what they personally coded and how the solution behaved once it reached production. You should be equally comfortable discussing traditional software engineering principles as you are discussing LLMs. We are not looking for somebody whose AI experience begins and ends with: “I use Copilot every day.” We want someone who can say: “I built this AI capability, integrated it into the product, deployed it to customers and can explain exactly how it works.” Location & package Central Nottingham Hybrid – 3 days per week onsite Salary up to £70,000 depending on experience This is an excellent opportunity for a strong .NET engineer who has already moved beyond experimenting with Generative AI and wants to build serious AI functionality inside established commercial software products.