Staff AI Engineer - Contract - London

We're recruiting a Staff AI Engineer for a senior contract role leading LLM/GenAI, agentic systems and production ML. You'll set technical direction, architect and deliver high-impact AI systems end to end, raise engineering standards and mentor other engineers, working with a high degree of autonomy on business-critical problems. Location: London, UK Day rate: £800–£900 per day (IR35 status to be confirmed) Contract: Initial 6–12 months, likely extension What you'll do:

• Define the technical strategy and architecture for AI products and platforms
• Lead delivery of production AI systems, including LLM applications, RAG, agents and fine-tuned models
• Build evaluation frameworks and quality gates, including offline benchmarks and online experimentation
• Architect scalable inference, data and MLOps infrastructure, optimising latency, reliability and cost
• Lead build-versus-buy and model/vendor decisions, presenting trade-offs to senior stakeholders
• Establish responsible AI practice across safety, bias testing, privacy and governance
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through design and code reviews What you'll bring:
• 8–12 years' software or ML engineering experience, with 3–5 years shipping production AI/ML at senior or staff level
• Track record of leading complex AI projects from problem definition to production impact
• Expert Python skills and deep experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow and modern LLM tooling
• Strong experience designing evaluation methods for ML and LLM-based systems
• Proven MLOps and cloud production experience, including containers, CI/CD and monitoring
• Excellent communication and influencing skills with senior stakeholders
• Right to work in the UK Desirable: agentic systems, RAG, fine-tuning and vector search; MSc/PhD or published research and open-source contributions; Spark, Databricks, Snowflake or Kafka; regulated environments.