Lead AI Engineer

• Up to £170,000 per annum
• London Area (Hybrid - 3/wk)
• Strong Software Engineering Fundamentals

Futureheads are engaged exclusively on a search for a Lead AI Engineer working on a significant enterprise AI modernisation and transformation programme.

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who combines deep software engineering experience with genuine, production-level experience using AI across development.

The role:

• Building AI-assisted software engineering workflows, including coding agents and agent orchestration
• Designing evaluation, testing and quality frameworks for AI-generated code
• Building and evolving distributed, high-volume, resilient systems
• Working across AWS, cloud-native infrastructure, CI/CD and observability
• Reviewing and challenging AI-generated code, with engineering judgement remaining central
• Developing the guardrails, validation and human oversight required to use AI reliably in production
• Contributing to architecture and engineering standards across a complex technology environment
• Highly experienced senior+ software engineering experience
• A polyglot background, with Go, Java or TypeScript particularly relevant
• A strong track record building complex, enterprise-scale distributed systems
• Deep experience across cloud, architecture, CI/CD and production engineering
• Proven use of AI meaningfully across the software development lifecycle
• Experience with AI-generated code, coding agents, agentic workflows, evaluation or AI-assisted development
• Strong engineering judgement around quality, security, resilience and failure modes
• Someone who remains genuinely hands-on and technically close to the work

This isn't an ML research role or a people-management position. It's an opportunity for an experienced software engineer with strong fundamentals to help shape what AI-first software engineering looks like at enterprise scale.