Principal AI Engineer

Overview

This hybrid role blends 80% hands-on technical leadership—building, deploying, and optimising AI systems across our product suite—with 20% evangelism and enablement, partnering with Marketing, Sales, and Finance to embed AI into internal processes and drive organisation-wide adoption.

As the Principal AI Engineer, you will report directly to the Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTPO) and collaborate with our distributed engineering organisation (120+ engineers across the UK, USA, and India) to deliver scalable, production-grade AI integrations that elevate both user experience and internal capabilities. You’ll lead the design, development, and deployment of advanced AI solutions, shaping innovation, establishing best practices, and ensuring the reliability and scalability of our AI systems.

• Design, build, and deploy AI‑powered features across Ventur Ed’s education platforms — including intelligent admissions assistants, automated decision‑support tools, payments solutions supporting over $1bn in transactions, and school communication systems.
• Develop and integrate agentic frameworks (e.g.,
  Lang Chain
  , Lang Graph
  ) and vector database architectures to power natural language workflows for users.
• Implement RAG pipelines
  , semantic search, and context‑extension frameworks to enhance LLM performance, reliability, and accuracy.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to customise and fine‑tune foundation models (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) for domain‑specific applications.
• Build and manage API configurations, guardrails, and data‑modelling layers to support secure AI deployment within sensitive educational‑data environments.
• Apply ML Ops best practices for deploying, monitoring, and iterating on AI systems in production.
• Partner with Marketing, Sales, Finance, and other internal teams to identify automation opportunities and data‑driven enhancements.
• Develop AI‑powered internal tools and workflows (using platforms like n8n
  , Copilot
  , Cursor
  ) to boost cross‑functional productivity.
• Champion a culture of AI adoption through education, experimentation, and showcasing impactful internal use cases.

You’ll play a pivotal role in transforming Ventur Ed into an AI‑enabled EdTech powerhouse.

Early impact projects include:

• Admissions Intelligence Agent — an NLP‑driven system that helps schools assess and qualify student applications more efficiently, with suggestive follow‑up actions.
• Parent Application Assistant — generative tools that guide families in strengthening their applications and discovering well‑matched institutions.

These prototypes will form the foundation of a scalable, AI‑driven ecosystem that improves how thousands of schools operate, make decisions, and engage with students and families.

• Deep proficiency in Python
  , machine learning, and modern data‑science techniques.
• Experience deploying and scaling AI systems in multi‑cloud environments (
  Azure preferred
  , with AWS exposure).
• Hands‑on experience with tools such as Azure Foundry
  , AWS Sage Maker
  , or similar platforms for model deployment and experimentation.
• Proficiency with agentic frameworks (Lang Chain, Lang Graph), vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma), and prompt‑engineering methodologies.
• Familiarity with LLM operations — fine‑tuning, context‑window extension, RAG pipelines, and model evaluation.
• Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and safety frameworks — particularly within regulated or sensitive environments (education, healthcare, public sector, etc.).
• Experience building and maintaining MLOps pipelines for CI/CD, versioning, and model‑performance monitoring.

• Proven ability to bridge technical and business domains while influencing cross‑functional leaders and evangelising AI adoption.
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to explain complex AI concepts to non‑technical audiences.
• A builder mindset — comfortable working autonomously, iterating quickly, and delivering production‑grade systems.

• Advanced degree (MSc/PhD) in Computer Science, Data Science, or related STEM…