AI Lead Engineer - UK Remote


Company:	Hays Specialist Recruitment
Salary:	£550 to £100,000 a year
Hours:	Full-time
Location:	Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 6SN
Working pattern:	Hybrid - 4 days remote
Job type:	Permanent
Posting date:	27 Oct 2026
Closing date:	3 Nov 2026

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Summary

AI Lead Engineer

WFH/Hybrid | Newcastle once per week

We're looking for a Lead AI Engineer to take a hands-on technical role within a major AI transformation programme.You'll design and build production-grade AI solutions, including RAG pipelines, semantic search, vector/embedding infrastructure and generative AI capabilities, integrating them into complex cloud and legacy environments.

What you'll be doing

Building and deploying scalable RAG and GenAI solutions

Developing LLM orchestration and agentic AI workflows

Leading engineering standards, code reviews and technical delivery

Implementing AI evaluation, guardrails and Responsible AI controls

Building secure, observable AI services with CI/CD and MLOps

Mentoring engineers and transferring knowledge to internal teams

What we're looking for

Strong Python engineering skills

Commercial experience with LLMs, RAG, embeddings and vector search

LangChain, LlamaIndex or similar frameworks

MLOps/LLMOps and automated AI evaluation

AWS, Azure or GCP

Docker, containers and Infrastructure-as-Code

Experience building secure, production-grade AI systems

Public-sector experience and cloud certifications are desirable.

Hays Specialist Recruitment Limited acts as an employment agency for permanent recruitment and employment business for the supply of temporary workers. By applying for this job you accept the T&C's, Privacy Policy and Disclaimers which can be found at hays.co.uk

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