AI Engineer

Business Technology

Permanent

IT Development Manger

Hybrid

No

10740

Reporting to the IT Development Manager, with a dotted line to the Director of Helix, you will be a senior, experienced AI Engineer (FDE) embedded within the Helix team. You will work at the point where legal practice, client needs and advanced AI meet: independently discovering high-value problems, shaping practical solutions, building them and helping take them safely into use.

This is a hands-on senior individual-contributor role, combining consulting-style engagement skills with strong engineering judgement. You will turn legal and business workflows into secure, usable AI-enabled products and prototypes, while feeding lessons from delivery into Helix, Business Technology and the wider innovation roadmap.

The role is not a pure data-science or research position, and it is not primarily a front-end role. You should be comfortable building end-to-end working solutions and integrations; where a polished production interface or shared platform component is needed, you will partner with dedicated front-end and software engineers.

• Forward deployment and solution delivery:
  Lead discovery and solution design with lawyers, practice groups, clients and business-services teams. Translate ambiguous legal and operational problems into small, testable delivery plans; build, iterate and demonstrate usable AI-enabled solutions; and make clear decisions about what should remain an experiment, be productised or be retired.
• Agentic AI and LLM engineering:
  Design and implement reliable agentic workflows, including tool use, retrieval, evaluation, orchestration, guardrails, human-in-the-loop controls and observability. Apply LLMOps practices to evaluate, monitor and improve LLM-based systems, with particular attention to legal accuracy, confidentiality, security, provenance and responsible use.
• Platforms and technical delivery:
  Use approved OpenAI capabilities, including relevant API, Skills and Work capabilities, alongside FleetAI and other approved platforms where they best meet the use case and governance requirements. Build production-minded back-end services, APIs, data flows and cloud deployments using Python and appropriate modern engineering practices.
• Collaboration:
  
  Work with Helix Managers on discovery, prioritisation, user outcomes and product direction. Collaborate with front-end engineers, software engineers, platform teams, data governance, information security and architecture colleagues across Innovation and IT to move validated work into supported services.
• Technical leadership:
  Act as a technical leader without an initial people-management remit: communicate technical choices, trade-offs, risks and progress clearly; mentor colleagues; create reusable patterns and playbooks; and contribute to recruitment and capability-building as the team grows.
• Training and support:
  Help build AI fluency across the function through mentoring, workshops and accessible technical guidance. Stay current with legal AI, foundation models, agentic systems and cloud tooling, translating emerging capability into practical opportunities for the firm.

• Substantial, demonstrable experience delivering AI, software or data products in complex, client-facing or regulated environments. We expect a senior practitioner who can operate independently and credibly with stakeholders.
• Strong practical experience with modern LLM application development and agentic systems. This must include building or operating LLM-enabled applications rather than only consuming off-the-shelf tools.
• Strong Python engineering skills, including API development, integration patterns, testing and maintainable code. Experience with SQL, Docker, cloud services and CI/CD is expected.
• Experience deploying solutions on a cloud platform, ideally Microsoft Azure, with a sound understanding of identity, security, data protection and operational reliability.
• Experience with RAG, embeddings, evaluation frameworks, prompt and version management, model safety controls and observability. Familiarity with OpenAI APIs and enterprise AI platforms is highly desirable.
• Excellent consulting, communication and facilitation skills: able to build trust, frame problems, make progress amid ambiguity and explain complex matters simply.
• A relevant degree or equivalent professional experience in computer…