Hays Specialist Recruitment

AI Lead Engineer - UK Remote

Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 6SN

Key information

Pay
£550 to £100,000 a year
Hours
Full-time
Contract
Permanent
Workplace arrangement
Hybrid - 4 days remote
Posted date
27 Oct 2026
Closing date
3 Nov 2026

About this role

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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