AI Engineer

SF Partners • Permanent • Birmingham, West Midlands, England, United Kingdom • £60,000 - £70,000 / year • 1h ago

AI Engineer

Salary: up to £65,000
Location: UK based - Midlands preferred, but remote considered
Type: Permanent

I'm working with a growing fintech/scale-up that is building AI into a customer-facing product used within the affordability and financial services space.

They already have an AI virtual assistant within the platform, but until now a lot of the specialist AI work has sat with an external partner. They've reached the point where they want to start bringing that capability in-house and are looking for someone who can help them build on what is already there.

This is not a role for someone who wants to train their own LLM from scratch. It is more about taking existing LLMs and AI services, understanding how to use them properly, and building useful product features around them.

The business is fairly open-minded on level. You might be a graduate with a year or two of experience, a Python developer who has started moving into AI, a Machine Learning Engineer, or a Data Scientist with stronger engineering habits. They are not expecting someone to have ten years of LLM experience, because realistically very few people do.

What they do need is someone bright, practical and genuinely interested in building AI that works in the real world.

You'll be working on the AI side of a product that helps users complete income and expenditure journeys. In simple terms, the customer can either fill in the form themselves, or interact with the virtual assistant, which helps capture and complete the information for them.

That means the AI work has to fit into a wider software product. It needs to connect with the front end, work safely, be tested properly, and be built with security in mind from the start.

The role will involve:

Building and improving AI/LLM features using Python
Creating quick proof of concepts to test ideas
Taking the right ideas further into production
Working with existing LLMs, APIs and AI services
Thinking about guardrails, safety, hallucination risk and validation
Building software in a secure way, particularly given the regulated nature of the product
Supporting automated testing rather than treating testing as an afterthought
Working in a DevOps environment where builds, releases and deployments are automated
Understanding how the AI module fits into the wider product and customer journey

The key things they are looking for are:

Strong Python skills
A good general understanding of LLMs
Some exposure to GenAI, chatbots, NLP, RAG, prompt engineering or similar
An interest in AI guardrails and responsible use of AI
Good software engineering principles
Awareness of security in modern development
A willingness to test properly and automate where possible
Some understanding of cloud platforms - Azure would be ideal, but AWS or GCP is fine
The ability to learn quickly and work out the right way to use new technologies

It would also be useful if you had experience with JavaScript, deep learning, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI APIs or similar tools, but none of these are absolute requirements.

This is probably best suited to someone who wants more ownership than they may get in a larger business. You'll be close to senior technology leadership, close to the product, and involved in shaping how AI is used rather than just being handed small pieces of work.

The most important thing is mindset. They want someone who can build, test, learn quickly, and stay focused on why the feature is being built in the first place.