Applied AI Engineer - Outside Ir35

Senior Applied AI Backend Engineer | Contract | Remote, London-based I'm working with a global sportswear business hiring into its internal AI lab, building interactive digital products around movement and sport. You'll join a small engineering team developing voice-first AI agents, tackling the memory, retrieval and backend systems that make real-time conversations work reliably. We're looking for a 0-to-1 builder who can take ownership of an early-stage codebase and ship production software. The role

• Build agent memory across short-term context and long-term stores
• Develop ingestion pipelines for audio, video and text
• Implement hybrid search, combining vector and keyword retrieval with re-ranking
• Build automated evaluations and tracing for retrieval, tool use and agent behaviour
• Own backend services through deployment and operation on GCP What we're looking for
• Strong production Python, including async programming, FastAPI and Pydantic
• Hands-on experience with agent memory, retrieval and search systems
• Solid PostgreSQL and indexing experience, ideally including pgvector
• Experience building evaluation frameworks and using tools such as Langfuse, Braintrust or LangSmith
• Comfortable making technical decisions independently and working through ambiguity
• Voice AI or real-time streaming experience would be a strong bonus Stack: Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, pgvector, GCP, Kubernetes. TypeScript / NestJS across the wider platform. 📍 Remote, UK based candidates only 📅 9-month contract, potential to extend 🚀 ASAP start