Principal AI Engineer

Founding AI Engineer — Build an AI Capability From the Ground UpA leading global investment business is looking to make its first dedicated AI Engineering hire — a rare opportunity to build and shape AI capability from day one inside a highly respected organisation managing tens of billions in assets.This is far beyond experimentation or internal demos. The successful candidate will design, build, and own production-grade AI systems that solve real business problems — from advanced RAG pipelines and agentic workflows to internal AI platforms used across the organisation.This role offers genuine autonomy, visibility, and the chance to influence AI strategy, architecture, and engineering standards at an early stage.Why this opportunity stands outFoundational AI hire with significant ownership and influenceGreenfield environment with freedom to shape tooling, architecture, and best practicesDirect exposure to complex, high-value datasets and workflowsStrong long-term investment and commitment to AI from leadershipOpportunity to build systems with immediate, measurable impactThe roleBuild production-grade RAG pipelines across complex unstructured dataDesign and deploy multi-agent AI systems and orchestration frameworksIntegrate LLMs across OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-source ecosystemsDevelop semantic search, vector database, and graph-based retrieval systemsOwn AI evaluations, observability, governance, and reliabilityBuild internal AI products that enhance decision-making and operational efficiencyThe ideal profileProven experience shipping production AI/LLM systems used by real usersStrong end-to-end engineering capability — from architecture through deploymentDeep Python and backend engineering experienceStrong understanding of modern AI tooling, RAG, and agentic systemsComfortable operating in ambiguity and building from scratchUses AI tooling aggressively, but critically and responsiblyCares about product quality, reliability, and business outcomes — not just modelsTech environmentPython • FastAPI • LangGraph/LangChain • Vector Databases • Graph Databases • OpenAI/Anthropic • Azure AI • RAG • Agentic Systems • APIs • CI/CD • Cloud InfrastructureLondon | Senior / Principal LevelThis is an exceptional opportunity for an ambitious AI Engineer looking to build something meaningful at the frontier of applied AI — with the autonomy, backing, and technical scope to make a genuine impact.