Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer

AI Engineering Lead We're exclusively partnering with a growing organisation making a significant investment in AI and looking for an AI Engineering Lead to help establish and build its internal AI engineering capability. This is a hands on technical leadership role sitting at the intersection of Generative AI, Azure and engineering. You'll lead the design and production delivery of AI enabled solutions, establish the technical standards and architecture behind them, and provide technical direction to engineers as the capability grows. The focus is on taking AI beyond proof of concepts and experimentation and building secure, scalable solutions that can be used across the organisation. What you'll be doing

• Leading the development of an internal Azure AI engineering capability
• Designing and delivering production grade Generative AI and AI enabled solutions
• Providing technical direction across Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, AI Search and Document Intelligence
• Designing RAG solutions, agentic workflows, tool calling, grounding and structured outputs
• Determining where AI provides genuine value versus where traditional deterministic approaches are more appropriate
• Establishing reusable AI architecture, engineering patterns and development standards
• Leading and mentoring engineers working across AI enabled solutions
• Designing how AI applications integrate securely with enterprise systems, APIs, data and workflows
• Addressing AI specific risks including hallucinations, prompt injection, data leakage and uncontrolled agent actions
• Establishing appropriate evaluation, monitoring, security and governance around production AI
• Remaining hands on across Python, C#/.NET and Azure where required
• Owning the technical lifecycle of AI solutions from architecture and development through to deployment and production What we're looking for Ideally, you'll bring:
• Strong experience designing and delivering production solutions within Microsoft Azure
• Commercial experience delivering Generative AI or AI enabled applications
• Experience with Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry or equivalent
• Understanding of RAG, AI Search, agentic workflows, Document Intelligence and AI evaluation
• Strong software engineering foundations with Python, C#/.NET or both
• Experience taking AI solutions beyond proof of concept and into secure production environments
• Strong Azure architecture knowledge across APIs, Functions, messaging, integrations and cloud services
• Experience with CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code and modern engineering practices
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers
• The ability to communicate AI architecture, risks and technical decisions to senior technical and non technical stakeholders Why this role? This is an opportunity to play a leading role in how a large organisation adopts and scales AI. Rather than joining an established AI function with all of the decisions already made, you'll help define how AI solutions are architected, built, evaluated and deployed, while remaining close to the technology yourself. It would suit an experienced AI Engineering Lead, Azure AI Architect, Principal AI Engineer or senior Azure engineer who has moved heavily into Generative AI and wants the opportunity to shape a growing capability. Location: London, hybrid Type: Permanent, full time