AI Principal

AI Principal Who We Are

AND Digital are a tech company focused on accelerating digital delivery and dedicated to closing the digital skills gap. We’ve been helping organisations build better digital products and stronger digital teams since 2014.

We believe our work should always make a remarkable impact for our clients. We do this through our regional offices (or ‘Clubs’) building strong relationships with our partners, so that they are always prioritised by a team within close proximity. This unique model has driven success for our clients and ourselves, evidenced by our remarkable organic growth since 2014. Today we number more than 1,300 people with Clubs all over the UK, Europe and the USA with plans for global expansion in the next couple of years.

Join us - and help us fulfil our mission to close the world’s digital skills gap.

The AI Principal will use their expert technical knowledge to influence the direction of AI‑driven projects, whilst coaching clients and teams alike on how to adopt best‑in‑class AI practices to build and deliver remarkable products.

You will step into a role where you won’t just build systems; you will act as a persuasive realist for our clients. You will champion software quality, Human‑Centred AI, and the necessary guardrails required for enterprise adoption. Whether you are architecting large‑scale, production‑ready AI implementations, evangelising best practices to executives, or mentoring engineers, you will be the driving force behind turning AI hype into tangible business value.

• Deep Software Engineering
  
  Experience:
  
  Expert knowledge across the whole stack, with a proven ability to design and build scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems. A good understanding of data strategies would also be valuable.
• Architectural Vision:
  Comfortable shaping how we deliver engagements as the technical expert, bringing the best thinking to clients in terms of standards, templates, ways of working, and tools.
• Hands‑on Excellence:
  Comfortable being hands‑on with development teams, understanding what great code looks like, and applying a Dev Ops mindset to ensure operational readiness.
• Cloud & Infrastructure:
  Strong grounding in cloud‑native patterns (AWS preferred), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and CI/CD pipelines.
• Articulation:
  Act as a persuasive, but realist, evangelist for AI best practices, educating stakeholders, at any level, on the value impact.

• Agentic Architectures:
  Design and oversee the delivery of autonomous, agent‑based systems that utilise tools, APIs, and multi‑step reasoning to solve complex business workflows.
• Compound AI Systems:
  Shift beyond single‑model interactions to architect complex systems that integrate multiple LLMs, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), and deterministic logic guardrails.
• Model Agnostic Strategy:
  Build "pluggable" technical architectures that allow for model interoperability, enabling the business to switch between providers without significant re‑engineering.
• LLMOps at Scale:
  Oversee the end‑to‑end lifecycle of AI products, from prompt versioning and vector database indexing to automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Performance Optimization:
  Balance technical sophistication with commercial reality by implementing Small Language Models (SLMs) or edge‑runtime solutions to optimise for latency and cost.

• Evaluation & Reliability:
  Define and implement robust evaluation frameworks to measure model performance and accuracy (e.g., using "Golden Datasets" and automated benchmarking).
• Safety & Ethics:
  Lead the technical strategy for bias mitigation, toxicity filtering, and hallucination management, ensuring all AI solutions are ethical and transparent.
• Cost & Performance Engineering:
  Apply a pragmatic, commercial lens to technical design. Balance sophistication with reality by implementing Small Language Models (SLMs) or edge‑runtime solutions to optimise for latency, cost, and efficiency.
• Technical Advisory:
  Comfortable guiding clients through the AI landscape, advising on realistic opportunities and navigating the practical value of emerging…