Lead Generative AI Engineer

Salary: £65,000 - 105,000 per year

Requirements:

• Youve set technical direction that other engineering teams actually adopted, and you can talk about where that worked and where it didnt.
• Strong Python, and SQL you genuinely use.
• Deep, current expertise across the GenAI stack, including retrieval at scale, vector stores, agentic orchestration, multimodal work, evaluation infrastructure and fine-tuning where it earns its place.
• Youre fluent in the layer underneath: MLOps tooling, deployment and cloud infrastructure (we run on AWS and GCP), and you can tell the difference between a choice that matters and one that doesnt.
• You design systems that survive contact with production, and youve been on the hook when they didnt.
• A strong point of view on evaluation, including the difference between evals that catch regressions and evals that provide comfort.
• Your direct contributions set a quality bar for the people around you.
• You explain hard technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders without either condescending or losing the substance.
• Self-awareness about where your knowledge runs out, and the instinct to bring in expertise early.
• You build with taste, preferring simple systems that work over clever ones that nearly do.
• You use authority sparingly. Youre not a blocker, but youll stop a bad decision from shipping.
• You get satisfaction from the unglamorous work that makes AI features actually good, not just the part that demos well.
• You enjoy making other engineers better as much as building things yourself.
• Youve levelled people up in a way theyd recognise, whether through a talk, a review, or how you work day to day.
• You hold a two-to-three-year view without losing touch with whats shipping this month.

Responsibilities:

• Set the architecture standard for complex GenAI work across the function, not by mandate but by building things others learn from and want to adopt.
• Hold sign-off on materially complex AI systems, catching architectural, safety and reliability problems before they reach production.
• Own the shared foundations that determine feature quality across teams: retrieval patterns, evaluation infrastructure, data pipelines, and the tooling that makes good practice the easy path.
• Build the hardest pieces of work directly, acting as the technical escalation point for the functions toughest problems.
• Design for systems that stay up and stay affordable, covering graceful degradation, fallback behaviour, and cost and latency at production scale.
• Develop the senior engineers around you by handing them harder problems, room to own decisions, and honest feedback.
• Shape how we hire and review, bringing a clear and defensible view of what good looks like.
• Bring specific, actionable industry insight into planning, explaining what a development means for our architecture rather than noting that the field moves fast.

Technologies:

• AI
• AWS
• Cloud
• Fine-tuning
• GCP
• Machine Learning
• MLOps
• Python
• SQL
• LLM
• Network

More:

We are Motorway, the UKs largest online car-selling platform, connecting private sellers directly with over 8,000 dealers nationwide. Founded in 2017, our award-winning, technology-led approach has redefined the experience of selling a car, and we are backed by some of the worlds leading technology investors, having raised 143 million in Series C funding. GenAI Engineering sits within our Data and AI function alongside Machine Learning and the Machine Learning Data Platform, owning the AI features that shape how buyers and sellers experience the marketplace. This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing scale-up at a crucial phase of growth and help change an industry for the better. The role is based in London, full time, with a hybrid working model of 2 days a week in our London office. We offer a competitive salary, equity scheme, 25 days holiday, private medical insurance via BUPA, life assurance, pension scheme with 5% employer contribution, enhanced family leave, 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme, EV leasing, cycle to work, nursery salary sacrifice, and 1 paid volunteering day a year.

last updated 36 week of 2026