Software Engineer - AI

Howden (Yorkshire) or Paddington (London)

IT Dev

Full time

Permanent

Join PA Media Group's new AI Enablement team as a founding senior engineer who lives at the bleeding edge of AI-native development. This isn't traditional software engineering - you'll leverage agentic engineering approaches, Claude Code, and the latest AI capabilities to ship solutions at unprecedented velocity, moving from concept to working prototype in days whilst pushing the boundaries of what's technically possible.

Working in the latest technologies and partnering tightly with the Product Owner - AI, you'll be embedded directly with the business teams across PA Media, Alamy, Podium, StreamAMG, and Press Release & Marketing Services. You'll experiment relentlessly, iterate rapidly, and enable business success through technology that others haven't figured out how to build yet. This is senior-level engineering for those who thrive on high energy, constant innovation, and the freedom to explore emerging capabilities before they become mainstream.

This is a founding senior engineer role in PA Media Group's new AI Enablement team. You won't just build AI systems - you'll define what AI-native engineering means for the organization. We're deliberately keeping the team tiny, giving you extraordinary autonomy to experiment, fail fast, and establish patterns that scale. This is the opposite of corporate engineering: no lengthy approval processes, no legacy constraints slowing you down, just smart engineers moving at startup velocity within a 150+ year institution.

You’ll work differently from traditional engineering roles - you’re forward deployed. You’re embedded with the teams who’ll use what you build, getting feedback in real-time, iterating based on actual usage patterns, and seeing your code make immediate tangible impact. You'll move between news production, visual content licensing, sports analytics, streaming platforms, and press distribution - solving wildly different technical challenges whilst building your understanding of what AI can achieve across diverse contexts.

The technical environment rewards innovation and experimentation. You'll have permission to try emerging capabilities, leverage cutting‑edge AI platforms before they're mainstream, and push boundaries that more conservative organizations can’t justify. We expect some experiments to fail - that's the cost of experimentation. What matters is velocity of learning, speed of iteration, and the ability to scale successes aggressively when you discover approaches that work.

The problems you’ll tackle matter beyond technical curiosity: enabling journalists to work faster without sacrificing accuracy, helping visual content discovery at unprecedented scale, powering sports analytics with AI‑enhanced insights, maintaining trust that defines our heritage whilst embracing transformative technology. This is AI-native engineering at its finest - where your code doesn’t just ship features but defines how a heritage institution leads digital transformation rather than follows it.

• Integrity
  :
  Acting with trustworthiness, fairness, and accountability in everything we do.
• Ambition
  :
  Setting bold goals, striving for excellence, and inspiring progress.
• Innovation
  :
  Being curious, solving problems, and embracing a creative future. We constantly ask "how might we?" to reimagine what's possible.
• Collaboration
  :
  Building meaningful connections, valuing diverse perspectives, and achieving more together.

• Ship AI-powered solutions at velocity using AI-native development approaches - leveraging Claude Code and agentic engineering techniques to build in hours what traditionally takes days, constantly exploring how AI can accelerate your own engineering workflow whilst solving business problems.
• Build rapid proof‑of‑concepts embedded directly with business teams - moving from requirements to working demonstration with astonishing speed, using technologies such as Type Script/Node.js/AWS to create solutions users can touch and test immediately in their actual working environment.
• Push technical boundaries through continuous…