Lead AI Engineer

Lead AI Engineer Remote UK £100,000–£130,000 + Equity Neulinx is working with a well-established SaaS company entering a major AI transformation phase. The platform is already used by large enterprise customers globally and is now evolving from traditional analytics into AI-driven products, including real-time insights, recommendation systems and agent-based automation over live business data. They are hiring a Lead AI Engineer to own the core data and AI infrastructure enabling this shift. This is not an LLM integration or prompt engineering role. You'll focus on the underlying platform: how data is structured, governed and exposed safely and reliably to AI systems and agents. What you'll do

• Own the architecture for data and AI systems across the platform
• Build batch and streaming pipelines for real-time use cases
• Design data layers for agents, search and retrieval systems, including MCP-style tooling
• Define schemas, contracts and data governance standards
• Lead decisions across storage, search and data infrastructure
• Implement observability, lineage and data quality controls
• Ensure secure, privacy-aware AI system design, including guardrails and prompt injection protection
• Work cross-functionally and influence architecture without formal authority
• Stay hands-on while shaping the long-term technical direction What they're looking for Strong experience owning data or AI platforms within production SaaS environments, with exposure to several of the following:
• LLM applications, AI agents or orchestration frameworks
• MCP or similar tool and agent architectures
• Distributed systems and large-scale data pipelines
• PostgreSQL, MongoDB or DocumentDB, MySQL and Redshift
• Elasticsearch or search and retrieval systems
• AWS, including Kinesis, Lambda, SQS and SNS
• Kubernetes or EKS, Terraform and CI/CD
• Redis or ElastiCache
• TypeScript and Node.js
• Observability tools, including Datadog, Sentry, logging, tracing and SLOs
• AI safety, governance, GDPR and secure data handling You don't need experience with everything listed, but you should have a track record of turning complex and ambiguous requirements into scalable platform architecture. Why this role? You'll be shaping the AI foundations of a proven, revenue-generating SaaS platform rather than working on early-stage experimentation. There is real ownership, strong engineering autonomy and direct influence over how AI is embedded across a product used at global scale. Of interest? Apply and upload your CV, or reach out to Gareth at Neulinx directly for a confidential conversation.