Applied AI Engineer

Are you an Applied AI Engineer who enjoys turning cutting-edge AI capabilities into reliable, production-ready user experiences?

Join an ambitious technology company building next-generation AI-powered products designed to solve real-world problems. This role sits at the intersection of machine learning, software engineering and product development, focused on transforming AI models into dependable systems that deliver meaningful value to users at scale.

About The Role

As an Applied AI Engineer, you will bridge the gap between model capabilities and customer experiences.

You will work across the full AI product stack, shaping model behaviour, building orchestration systems, designing agent workflows and ensuring AI features perform reliably in production. This is a highly practical role focused on delivering user value, not simply experimenting with models.

You'll collaborate closely with machine learning engineers, product teams and software engineers to build intelligent systems that are reliable, measurable and scalable.

What You'll Do

AI Product Development

• Build and ship AI-powered features from end to end.
• Translate model capabilities into real-world product experiences.
• Design intelligent workflows that solve meaningful user problems.
• Own feature delivery from concept through production deployment.

Agent & Workflow Design

• Design and optimise:
  • Prompting strategies
  • Agent workflows
  • Tool integrations
  • Memory systems
  • AI orchestration frameworks
• Improve reliability and predictability of AI-powered behaviour.
• Create systems capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks.

AI Systems Engineering

• Transform raw model outputs into structured, dependable product experiences.
• Build supporting systems around model inference and orchestration.
• Integrate large language models and supporting services into production environments.
• Develop abstractions that simplify AI integration across products.

Performance & Reliability

• Debug issues across:
  • Models
  • Inference systems
  • Orchestration layers
  • Infrastructure
  • User experiences
• Optimise latency, reliability and operational efficiency.
• Improve production monitoring and observability.
• Design fallback and recovery mechanisms for failure scenarios.

Evaluation & Continuous Improvement

• Develop lightweight evaluation frameworks for measuring real-world effectiveness.
• Analyse user feedback and operational data.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and opportunities for optimisation.
• Drive continuous improvement through experimentation and iteration.

What We're Looking For

Experience

• Experience building and shipping AI-powered products or features.
• Strong understanding of machine learning systems and production AI environments.
• Experience deploying, evaluating or fine-tuning machine learning models.
• Track record delivering software that solves real user problems.

Technical Skills

• Strong Python development experience.
• Understanding of modern machine learning architectures.
• Experience working with large language models and AI APIs.
• Familiarity with model serving and inference systems.
• Ability to design and implement scalable AI workflows.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving capabilities.

AI & Systems Knowledge

• Experience with:
  • Prompt engineering
  • Agent frameworks
  • Tool calling
  • Memory systems
  • Orchestration workflows
  • Retrieval-based systems
• Understanding of model limitations and failure modes.
• Ability to improve reliability and consistency of AI outputs.

Personal Attributes

• Strong ownership mentality.
• Comfortable working across multiple technical domains.
• Able to operate effectively in fast-moving environments.
• Pragmatic and focused on delivering user value.
• Bias toward shipping, testing and continuous improvement.

Technology Stack

Experience with some or all of the following is beneficial:

• Python
• PyTorch
• JAX
• Large Language Models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Llama, Qwen and similar)
• Inference platforms and serving systems
• Vector Databases
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Agent and workflow orchestration frameworks

Success In The Role

• AI-powered features provide reliable and measurable value to users.
• Model behaviour becomes increasingly structured, predictable and robust.
• Production systems consistently meet performance, latency and reliability goals.
• Issues are identified, debugged and resolved efficiently.
• Evaluation frameworks provide clear signals for future improvements.
• Product decisions are informed by real-world usage and measurable outcomes.

Working Environment

You'll join a small, highly talented team that values ownership, technical excellence and rapid execution. Engineers are encouraged to work across disciplines, contribute ideas and take responsibility for outcomes from concept through deployment.

We move quickly, learn from real-world feedback and focus on building products that create meaningful impact. This is an opportunity to help define how AI products are built, evaluated and improved in production environments.

Why Join?

• Build AI-powered products used in real-world scenarios.
• Work at the intersection of machine learning, systems and product engineering.
• Own features from concept through deployment.
• Collaborate with experienced engineers, researchers and product leaders.
• Solve challenging problems in reliability, orchestration and AI behaviour.
• Help shape the future of AI-native applications.

Location: Remote from UK / Hybrid
Employment Type: Full-time
Salary Range: £65,000 - £85,000 GBP per annum

If you're an engineer who enjoys turning AI capabilities into practical, dependable user experiences and wants to work on some of the most exciting challenges in applied AI, we'd love to hear from you. Apply now or email Jack Baxter - jb@skillsearch.com

Years of experience and salary levels are shown purely as a guide. We will only consider applications from candidates that can demonstrate the skills or experience required for the role.

Please be aware that while we would love to respond to every application we receive, due to high numbers we cannot guarantee this. We do however appreciate any time you invest into the application and will make sure to get in touch should anything in future more closely fit your skillset.