AI Engineer

Location: fully remote, with occasional office visits in Leeds

VISA sponsorship is NOT available

A global FS business is building out its AI function from the ground up, and hiring 3 AI Engineers to join at the very start of that journey.

These are applied AI engineering roles - not ML/data science, not model-building. We're ideally looking for BE/Full-stack Engineers who progressed into AI Engineering 1-2 years ago.

It's a highly regulated, complex business that's spent 25 years becoming very good at the unsexy stuff - governance, compliance, risk, operational scale - and has just made a huge investment into AI to become the core of how the business runs, not a side project.

You’ll be integrating AI capabilities (via OpenAI, Anthropic, and similar) into real business workflows (document processing, knowledge retrieval etc.) with a philosophy of not reinventing the wheel, but rather choosing existing tools that are right for the job.

What we’re looking for:

• Strong, hands‑on Python engineering background - ideally you'd have been a software engineer who picked up AI in recent years
• Real, practical exposure to LLMs/agentic AI - RAG, embeddings, model context, agent frameworks (LangChain, Microsoft Agent Framework, or similar)
• The judgement to know when AI is the right tool and when it isn’t - this matters more here than almost anywhere else you interview
• Genuine curiosity and a track record of tinkering, building, and staying current - side projects, open-source contributions, or just things you've built for the love of it are taken seriously here, commercial or not
• The ability to communicate clearly with non-technical stakeholders - this role lives close to the business, not in a back room
• Comfort operating in a regulated environment where explainability and auditability aren't optional extras

What’s genuinely good about this role:

• Real budget, real appetite - this isn’t a "maybe next year" hire. Leadership signed this off within 24 hours of being asked. The business wants this done properly and is backing it.
• You’re joining at the start - this is a small, forming team (not a team of one lost in a huge org), with a technical lead already in place and a genuine guild/mentorship culture
• No hypothetical/research detours - you’ll ship things that matter, quickly, and see them used
• Almost fully remote work - genuinely not precious about where you live as long as you can get into Leeds from time to time (once every month or two)