AI Technical Lead

AI Technical Lead
£70,000 – £80,000 + bonus | Mostly remote

The opportunity
Join an established software business at the beginning of a major AI transformation and take technical ownership of its new AI capability.
This isn’t an isolated innovation role or a stream of disposable prototypes. You’ll remain hands-on, leading a small team to take AI ideas from an initial business problem through to secure, scalable functionality within established commercial products.
You’ll have the backing of a large international technology group, combined with the freedom and visibility of a close-knit R&D team. You’ll influence the architecture, engineering standards, delivery approach and long-term AI roadmap.

Responsibilities
Provide hands-on technical leadership across a multidisciplinary AI engineering team
Shape the architecture and technical direction for AI across the product suite
Lead the delivery of LLM, RAG and agentic AI solutions
Take ideas from discovery and proof of concept through to production
Establish standards for evaluation, security, observability, governance and cost control
Work directly with product and operational stakeholders to turn high-level problems into deliverable solutions
Mentor engineers, review designs and code, and remain actively involved in development
Assess where AI adds genuine value—and challenge its use where a conventional solution would be better

About you
You’ll be an experienced technical lead or senior backend engineer with genuine experience delivering AI functionality into production.
The established product environment is primarily C#/.NET and Microsoft Azure, so experience with this stack would be valuable. However, applications are also welcome from strong backend engineers working with Python, Java, Go or Node.js who understand distributed systems, production AI architecture and can work effectively across technologies.
You’ll combine hands-on engineering depth with the ability to lead others, make architectural decisions and communicate technical trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
Experience with Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, RAG, agentic workflows, Semantic Kernel or Microsoft Agent Framework, vector databases, evaluation frameworks and responsible AI controls would be particularly useful.

Salary and benefits
Up to £80,000 plus bonus
Mostly remote, with occasional visits to the Bristol office
The opportunity to build and lead a new AI engineering capability
Genuine influence over architecture, recruitment and the AI roadmap
A hands-on leadership role with real product ownership
Perkbox, Cycle-to-Work scheme and 24/7 employee support
Sabbatical option after two years

If you want to lead a team building AI that reaches real customers—and have a genuine say in how that capability is created—we’d like to hear from you.