Machine Learning Engineer

Staff Machine Learning Engineer | Permanent | Up to £160,000 + Bonus

Location: Hybrid – London (3 days per week on-site)
Salary: Up to £160,000 + c.20% bonus + additional benefits Employment: Permanent

We're supporting a major UK financial services organisation as they scale their AI engineering capability and accelerate the adoption of Generative AI and Agentic AI across the business.

We're looking for an exceptional Staff Machine Learning Engineer who combines deep hands‑on engineering expertise with the technical leadership to shape how AI is developed, deployed and adopted across multiple engineering teams.

This is a high-impact opportunity to help drive the organisation's UK AI agenda, leveraging established capabilities from its US operations while developing new solutions, engineering frameworks and use cases.

Crucially, this is a hands‑on technical leadership role
, not a purely strategic or management position.

The opportunity You'll play a central role in building and scaling enterprise AI capabilities, moving beyond conventional RAG and LLM applications towards increasingly sophisticated, high-complexity AI systems.

Working across multiple engineering teams, you'll help establish reusable AI engineering capabilities, accelerate delivery and drive the adoption of modern AI development practices within a highly regulated environment.

• Providing Staff-level technical leadership across Generative AI, LLM and Agentic AI initiatives.
• Designing and developing production-grade
  RAG, LLM and multi-agent solutions
  .
• Shaping reusable AI frameworks, tooling and engineering standards across multiple teams.
• Remaining deeply hands‑on, developing and deploying complex AI applications.
• Supporting the evolution towards higher-risk and higher-complexity AI use cases.
• Championing AI-assisted development tools to accelerate engineering delivery.
• Collaborating with senior technical stakeholders to identify opportunities, challenge approaches and drive adoption.
• Ensuring AI solutions meet the reliability, scalability and governance requirements of a regulated organisation.

• Extensive hands‑on
  Machine Learning Engineering and Applied AI experience.
• Deep expertise in
  LLMs, Generative AI, RAG and agentic architectures
  .
• Practical experience with frameworks such as
  Lang Chain and Lang Graph
  , alongside vector databases and associated technologies.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, particularly Python.
• Experience designing and deploying complex AI applications into production environments.
• Experience with
  AWS, MLOps and enterprise-scale AI infrastructure
  .
• Experience operating at
  Staff, Principal or equivalent technical leadership level
  .
• Ability to influence technical direction across multiple engineering teams while remaining genuinely hands‑on.
• Strong understanding of AI governance, evaluation, reliability and deployment considerations.
• Experience using modern AI development tools, such as Claude Code, to improve engineering productivity.

Experience delivering AI solutions within financial services or another highly regulated environment would be particularly beneficial.

This is an opportunity to take a leading technical role in an organisation making a significant investment in AI.

You'll have the chance to influence the direction of enterprise AI adoption in the UK, work on increasingly complex AI applications and help establish engineering capabilities that will be adopted across the wider business.

We're particularly interested in engineers who enjoy solving difficult technical problems, experimenting with emerging technologies and translating cutting‑edge AI capabilities into real‑world production systems
.

Salary:
Up to £160,000 + c.20% bonus and additional benefits