Staff Engineer - AI

Job-:
Technology

Location:

London, United Kingdom;
Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom

Schedule:

Full time Posted:
Staff Engineer – AI Function:
Tech

Location:

London or Peterborough Curious about what’s next?

So are we. Join Compare the Market and help to make financial decision making a breeze for millions.

At Compare the Market, we’re a purpose-driven business powered by tech and AI. We’re building high-performing, results-driven teams with the skills, mindset, and ambition to deliver outcomes ry role here plays a part in driving our mission forward, and we create an environment where you can bring your authentic self, grow a truly characterful career, and see the direct impact of your work on the lives of our customers.

We’ve carved a meerkat-shaped niche and we’re looking for ambitious, curious thinkers who thrive in a fast-moving, high-impact environment. If you love accountability, embrace challenge, and want to make a real difference, you’ll fit right in.

What you’ll be doing :
Set the technical direction for AI engineering. Evolving the technical vision, architecture and roadmap for our AI powered products and capabilities. Lead by example through hands-on engineering, establishing best practices and guiding teams towards scalable, reliable and maintainable solutions. Lead complex AI delivery from concept to production. Take end-to-end accountability for significant technical and architectural decisions, navigating trade-offs across capability, quality, speed, cost, latency, risk and scalability.

Act as the go-to technical authority for complex AI challenges, unblocking teams through architectural guidance, rapid prototyping and hands-on intervention where needed. Build production grade AI systems:
Drive the design, development and deployment of LLM-powered applications, including retrieval augmented generation (RAG), vector search, tool calling, agentic workflows and context management. Establish robust approaches to evaluation, observability, tracing, monitoring, fallback mechanisms, rate limiting and graceful degradation to ensure systems perform reliably in production, including when dealing with non deterministic behaviour. Champion responsible, secure and reliable AI. Embed security, safety and governance throughout the AI development lifecycle.

Establish appropriate controls for prompt injection, personally identifiable information (PII), output guardrails, human-in-the-loop oversight and auditability. Partner with Info Sec, Data Privacy, Legal and AI Governance teams to meet regulatory requirements, protect customer data and deliver trustworthy AI experiences. Influence engineering strategy across teams. You’ll work closely with engineering managers, product leaders and other technical stakeholders to shape AI development and deployment strategies.

Lead cross-team architectural reviews and technical decision-making, guide model and vendor selection, and communicate the trade-offs involved in capability, quality, latency, cost and data residency. Influence through technical credibility, collaboration and measurable outcomes rather than formal management authority

What we’re looking for:

We’re looking for a Staff level Software Engineer with exceptional software engineering fundamentals and a proven track record of taking complex AI-powered products from experimentation to production ’ll have hands on experience building production LLM applications, with strong technical depth in areas such as RAG, vector search, tool calling, agentic AI systems and context management. You’ll understand how to design and implement robust evaluation frameworks, including offline evaluations, LLM as a judge approaches and online performance metrics, enabling teams to measure and…