Senior Applied AI Engineer – Prompting & Evaluation

Salary: £58,000 - 98,000 per year

Requirements:

• Strong software engineering background with several years building and shipping production software.
• Substantial hands-on experience with large language models, including prompt design, context engineering, and structured outputs in real work.
• Experience building evaluations or test harnesses for LLM outputs and using them to improve quality measurably.
• Clear evidence of growing other engineers through mentoring, teaching, internal training, communities of practice, or similar.
• Daily working fluency with AI coding tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or equivalents, with a practical view of where they help and where they mislead.
• Preferred experience with retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, tool use, or fine-tuning in production settings.
• Preferred experience with LLM APIs, orchestration frameworks, vector search, embeddings, retrieval pipelines, evaluation datasets, or automated test suites for AI outputs.
• Preferred experience across more than one model provider, with understanding of their different strengths.
• Preferred domain exposure to distributive trades, rental, retail, automotive aftermarket parts, or garage management.
• Preferred experience helping teams adopt AI tooling in established or legacy codebases, not just greenfield projects.
• Preferred public sharing of work through talks, writing, or open-source contributions.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and refine prompts, context strategies, and agentic workflows for AI features in our products.
• Build evaluation into our AI work by testing prompts against real business cases at scale and measuring quality honestly.
• Work across models and providers, choosing pragmatically on quality, cost, and latency.
• Get deep into domain detail with product teams and subject matter experts to understand the business problem behind each feature.
• Coach engineers across teams through pairing, reviews, workshops, and one-to-one help so they get more from AI coding tools and LLMs.
• Build and maintain shared prompt patterns, reusable templates, evaluation harnesses, and internal guides.
• Run an internal community of practice where engineers share what is working, what failed, and why.
• Help define and maintain standards for prompting, context engineering, and evaluation across R&D as tools change.
• Share measurable results with engineering leadership, including where AI tooling is paying off and where it is not.
• Deliver AI features in our products with proper evaluation and measurable quality standards.
• Embed prompt engineering and evaluation best practice across the R&D organisation.
• Maintain high standards for safety, accuracy, and data handling in everything that ships.
• Work closely with engineering leadership, architecture, product, and cross-site engineering teams across the UK and South Africa.
• Travel between our UK and South Africa offices as part of coaching and community-building.
• Represent our engineering practice externally where appropriate through talks, writing, or open-source contributions.

Technologies:

• AI
• Copilot
• Cursor
• Fine-tuning
• GitHub
• Support
• LLM
• ERP
• LESS
• RAG

More:

We are Klipboard, formerly Kerridge Commercial Systems (KCS), and we provide specialist software, services, and support for distributive trade businesses around the world. Our clients include wholesalers, distributors, merchants, and retailers, from small traders to multinational enterprises. We have offices in the UK, Ireland, The Netherlands, South Africa, Kenya, and North America, and we are excited to be growing under our new brand across distribution, automotive, retail, rental, transport management, manufacturing, and field service management. We offer a flexible hybrid working policy, with three days in the office and two days working from home. We are embracing AI and emerging technologies to improve customer outcomes, collaboration, and continuous improvement, and we value curiosity, adaptability, inclusion, and learning in a global, growing business.

last updated 36 week of 2026