AI Lead Engineer

This is a hands-on technical role for an AI Lead Engineer within a major AI transformation programme, based in Newcastle upon Tyne with hybrid working and one day per week on site. You will design and build production-grade AI solutions, including RAG pipelines, semantic search, vector and embedding infrastructure, and generative AI capabilities, integrating them into complex cloud and legacy environments. Responsibilities include developing LLM orchestration and agentic AI workflows, leading engineering standards, code reviews and technical delivery, implementing AI evaluation, guardrails and Responsible AI controls, and mentoring engineers. The rate is £450–£550 per day, outside of scope.

AI Lead Engineer

WFH/Hybrid | Newcastle once per week
We're looking for a Lead AI Engineer to take a hands-on technical role within a major AI transformation programme.You'll design and build production-grade AI solutions, including RAG pipelines, semantic search, vector/embedding infrastructure and generative AI capabilities, integrating them into complex cloud and legacy environments.

What you'll be doing

• Building and deploying scalable RAG and GenAI solutions
• Developing LLM orchestration and agentic AI workflows
• Leading engineering standards, code reviews and technical delivery
• Implementing AI evaluation, guardrails and Responsible AI controls
• Building secure, observable AI services with CI/CD and MLOps
• Mentoring engineers and transferring knowledge to internal teams

What we're looking for

• Strong Python engineering skills
• Commercial experience with LLMs, RAG, embeddings and vector search
• LangChain, LlamaIndex or similar frameworks
• MLOps/LLMOps and automated AI evaluation
• AWS, Azure or GCP
• Docker, containers and Infrastructure-as-Code
• Experience building secure, production-grade AI systems

Public-sector experience and cloud certifications are desirable.

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