Applied AI Engineer; Business Solutions

Help business teams move faster with practical AI applications that solve real operational problems

Some engineers love technology for technology’s sake. This role is different. At Head First x Impellam, we are looking for someone who enjoys figuring things out, understands how organisations work and gets energy from building solutions that genuinely improve the day‑to‑day reality of teams across the business.

As an Applied AI Engineer, you work directly with departments such as Finance, HR, Commercial and Marketing to simplify processes, remove friction and help people work smarter through AI, automation and lightweight internal applications. You are not expected to have every framework, platform or tool mastered on day one. What matters more is how you think, how quickly you learn and how effectively you turn ambiguity into practical outcomes.

This is a highly visible role with real business impact. You will spend as much time understanding workflows, challenging assumptions and shaping solutions as you do building them. The people who thrive here are curious, pragmatic and comfortable operating close to stakeholders rather than hidden behind tickets or isolated engineering backlogs.

As an Applied AI Engineer, you become part consultant, part builder and part problem solver. You embed directly with business teams to understand how work actually happens. Sometimes the challenge is operational inefficiency. Sometimes it is fragmented tooling, repetitive manual work or slow decision‑making caused by disconnected systems and unclear information flows.

Your role is to identify where AI, automation or lightweight applications can create immediate value and then help make that value real quickly and pragmatically. Rather than spending months designing perfect systems, you focus on delivering usable solutions fast, gathering feedback early and improving continuously. That could mean building an internal workflow tool, creating an AI‑powered assistant for operational teams or simplifying reporting and approvals through automation.

You work within a modern Databricks and AI‑enabled ecosystem, but technology is never the end goal. The real objective is helping teams operate more effectively, make better decisions and remove operational bottlenecks. AI plays a central role in how you work. AI coding assistants and agent‑based workflows help accelerate development and experimentation, allowing you to move quickly while still maintaining ownership over quality, usability and adoption.

At the same time, you collaborate closely with Platform, Data and Engineering teams to ensure the solutions you deliver fit within a scalable and secure organisational environment.

• Work closely with business stakeholders to understand operational challenges, workflows and inefficiencies;
• Translate ideas and business needs into practical tools, automations and AI-powered solutions;
• Build lightweight internal applications that improve productivity and simplify daily work;
• Use AI coding assistants and AI-native workflows to accelerate delivery and experimentation;
• Continuously iterate on solutions based on real user feedback and adoption;
• Support teams in improving processes rather than simply digitising existing inefficiencies;
• Collaborate with Finance, HR, Commercial and leadership teams on business‑critical initiatives;
• Balance speed and quality by making pragmatic engineering decisions that keep momentum high;
• Introduce smarter workflows through automation, AI agents and connected internal tooling;
• Help shape how AI is adopted responsibly and practically across the organisation;
• Contribute ideas, patterns and improvements that help teams move faster and work more effectively.

You are someone who enjoys solving problems in messy real‑world environments. You probably combine technical curiosity with strong communication skills and a genuine interest in how businesses operate. You do not need perfect requirements or fully defined roadmaps to get started. Instead, you ask questions, explore possibilities and move towards solutions quickly. You are energised by learning new things and comfortable adapting…