Hays

Hays

Leeds, Yorkshire and the Humber

Lead AI Engineer

Full-Time£100,000 - 100,000 per yearhierUnited Kingdom
IT

Job Description

Salary: £100,000 - 100,000 per year

Requirements:
  • Extensive backend engineering experience building production services such as APIs and microservices, with solid software engineering fundamentals.
  • Experience developing technical architecture and designs and taking them through enterprise review processes.
  • Experience delivering cloud solutions on AWS, including deploying, operating and troubleshooting services in live environments.
  • Working knowledge of modern DevOps practices such as CI/CD, containerisation and monitoring.
  • Solid backend engineering experience, with experience designing, building and running reliable services in production with attention to performance, resilience and security.
  • Direct experience building and operating solutions on AWS, including AWS AI services and the supporting platform services required for production delivery.
  • AI engineering experience delivering LLM-enabled systems using LLM APIs/Bedrock, including RAG architectures, vector databases and orchestration frameworks.
  • DevOps skills including CI/CD pipelines, containerisation and monitoring/observability, with experience defining release and operating practices for AI services.
  • Experience leading engineering teams, including providing technical guidance, aligning on standards and patterns, and adapting plans to resolve delivery and operational challenges.
  • Demonstrable capability in prompt design and in setting evaluation and testing approaches for LLM solutions, including quality, safety/guardrails and performance, with measurable success criteria.
Responsibilities:
  • Standardise and advance reusable AI solution patterns and reference architectures to improve cross-team consistency and delivery quality.
  • Establish end-to-end technical architectures for LLM-enabled systems, covering data pipelines, retrieval/RAG, prompt orchestration and agent workflows.
  • Analyse complex constraints across product, data, security, legal and operations, translating them into clear standards and recommendations.
  • Enhance CI/CD pipelines for AI systems by introducing automation, traceability and controlled release processes.
  • Define monitoring, observability and operational strategies to improve visibility across quality, performance, safety, cost and reliability.
  • Set standards for prompt engineering, evaluation and testing to enhance solution quality and behavioural consistency.
  • Advance digital and data-driven methods by shaping organisational practices and innovation efforts that produce measurable improvements in performance and efficiency.
  • Collaborate with senior stakeholders to deliver analytics-led solutions, addressing regulatory challenges and generating organisational impact.
Technologies:
  • AI
  • AWS
  • Backend
  • CI/CD
  • Cloud
  • DevOps
  • LLM
  • RAG
  • Security
  • microservices
  • Support

More:

We are the Data, Technology and Innovation (DTI) division, enabling the group to be a digital-first, data-led smart regulator by delivering a secure, agile and cost-effective technology and data ecosystem that drives better decisions, transparency and operational efficiency. Working alongside our wider AI Programme, we partner with business leads to shape and deliver work in priority areas including Authorisations, SPC, EMO and Anti Money Laundering. This Lead AI Engineer role is based in Leeds or Edinburgh and offers a salary of £72,000 to £108,000. We offer 28 days annual leave plus bank holidays, a hybrid model with a minimum of 40% in the office each month and an expectation of 50% for senior leaders, a non-contributory pension of 8-12% depending on age, and life assurance at eight times your salary.

last updated 34 week of 2026

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About Hays

Hays

Hays

Leeds

IT

Skills & Technologies

RailsAWSGitCI/CDAILLMAgileDevOpsUI

Inferred from job description

Salary Insight

£100,000

This role

£85,000

UK median

This salary is 18% above the UK median for Lead roles85,000/yr).

Based on 2024–2025 UK technology sector benchmarks

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