Principal AI Engineer

Founding AI Engineer — Build an AI Capability From the Ground Up

A 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 out

Foundational AI hire with significant ownership and influence

Greenfield environment with freedom to shape tooling, architecture, and best practices

Direct exposure to complex, high-value datasets and workflows

Strong long-term investment and commitment to AI from leadership

Opportunity to build systems with immediate, measurable impact

The role

Build production-grade RAG pipelines across complex unstructured data

Design and deploy multi-agent AI systems and orchestration frameworks

Integrate LLMs across OpenAI, Anthropic, and open-source ecosystems

Develop semantic search, vector database, and graph-based retrieval systems

Own AI evaluations, observability, governance, and reliability

Build internal AI products that enhance decision-making and operational efficiency

The ideal profile

Proven experience shipping production AI/LLM systems used by real users

Strong end-to-end engineering capability — from architecture through deployment

Deep Python and backend engineering experience

Strong understanding of modern AI tooling, RAG, and agentic systems

Comfortable operating in ambiguity and building from scratch

Uses AI tooling aggressively, but critically and responsibly

Cares about product quality, reliability, and business outcomes — not just models

Tech environment

Python • FastAPI • LangGraph/LangChain • Vector Databases • Graph Databases • OpenAI/Anthropic • Azure AI • RAG • Agentic Systems • APIs • CI/CD • Cloud Infrastructure

London | Senior / Principal Level

This 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.