Principal AI Engineer

Salary: £100,000 - 100,000 per year

Requirements:

• A minimum of a 2.1 degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, Statistics or a similar quantitative field.
• Proven experience leading multi-disciplinary teams to deliver AI/ML solutions to production.
• Demonstrable technical leadership in AI delivery, including architecture, product design principles and engineering excellence.
• Experience with modern AI engineering approaches such as prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic AI, model evaluation and monitoring using metrics such as precision, recall, NDCG and drift detection.
• Strong Python skills with a grounding in software engineering best practices, including CI/CD, testing and code reviews.
• Experience developing solutions at scale on cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS, with containerisation and orchestration tools including Kubernetes and Docker.
• Expertise in data engineering for AI, including handling large-scale, unstructured and multimodal data.
• Understanding of responsible AI principles, model interpretability and ethical considerations.
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to lead client projects, manage senior stakeholders and establish requirements and architecture concepts.
• Experience managing, coaching and developing junior team members and wider community.
• Desirable: experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow, and with fine-tuning or distillation of LLMs such as GPT, Llama, Claude and Gemini.
• Desirable: experience with machine learning libraries such as scikit-learn and XGBoost.
• Desirable: experience with data storage for AI, vector databases, semantic search and knowledge graphs.
• Desirable: active contribution to open-source AI projects, research publications and industry events or websites.
• Desirable: familiarity with AI security, privacy and compliance standards such as ISO42001.
• Desirable: experience shaping commercial AI offerings, winning AI work and supporting pre-sales.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the successful delivery of advanced AI solutions using machine learning, generative AI and agentic AI technologies.
• Drive adoption of modern AI frameworks, AIOps best practices and scalable cloud-native architectures.
• Provide technical leadership and engage with senior stakeholders to agree architectural principles, strategic direction and system architecture.
• Foster a culture of innovation, continuous learning and engineering excellence across the team and wider organisation.
• Manage, coach and develop the team, with a focus on standards, policies, enduring customer relationships and commercial acumen.
• Provide direction and leadership to help the team solve challenging problems together.

Technologies:

• Agentic AI
• AI
• AWS
• Azure
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Docker
• Fine-tuning
• Kubernetes
• Machine Learning
• PyTorch
• Python
• RAG
• Security
• TensorFlow
• Support

More:

We are Kainos, one of the UKs leading AI and data businesses, with a decade-long track record of delivering production-grade AI solutions across government, healthcare, defence and commercial sectors. Our 150-strong AI and Data Practice brings deep expertise in machine learning, generative AI, agentic AI and data, and we are trusted by Microsoft, AWS and other leading organisations to deliver advanced AI and data solutions at citizen scale. We are pioneers in responsible AI and have contributed to the UK governments AI Cyber Security Code of Practice implementation guide. We offer a people-first culture where ideas are valued, growth is supported and contributions make a real impact. We are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, and we provide a supportive recruitment process with adjustments available to candidates who need them.

last updated 31 week of 2026