Senior AI Engineer

Salary: £69,000 - 109,000 per year

Requirements:

• 3+ years of experience building with LLMs or NLP pipelines, ideally hands-on with OpenAI, Claude, Cohere, Gemini, Mistral, or Hugging Face
• Experience with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), prompt tuning, or instruction tuning on proprietary datasets
• Strong understanding of fine-tuning paradigms, from SFT to the principles behind RLHF/RLAIF preference modeling
• Strong Python skills, including working with LangChain, Hugging Face Transformers, and data pipelines such as Pandas, DVC, and Weights & Biases
• Comfortable defining and tracking generation quality with evaluation metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE, and building editorial-specific evaluators
• Exposure to STT/TTS tools for prototyping, such as Whisper, ElevenLabs, or Bark
• Strong communication and collaboration mindset, able to work closely with editorial and product stakeholders
• Curious and exploratory, comfortable working in ambiguity and pushing the boundaries of GenAI capabilities
• Experience fine-tuning models for style or persona, such as chatbots with specific character voices
• Exposure to LangSmith or similar observability tools for prompt and LLM testing
• Knowledge of voice synthesis, cloning, or emotion conditioning in audio pipelines
• Previous work in media, journalism, podcasting, or content production contexts
• Familiarity with multimodal generation across text, image, and audio, or interest in pushing toward that frontier
• Contributions to open-source LLM tools or libraries
• Interest in the ethical, editorial, and philosophical questions raised by AI-generated content

Responsibilities:

• Fine-tune large language models for style and tone alignment with our editorial voice
• Design, curate, and manage datasets used for fine-tuning, including versioning and annotation workflows
• Build and evaluate RAG pipelines that incorporate retrieval from structured content
• Prototype and test TTS pipelines for use in audio-first products
• Collaborate with infra, frontend, and design leads to ship internal tools and demos that explore GenAI capabilities
• Own quality evaluation pipelines, including BLEU, ROUGE, editorial scoring, custom evals, and human-in-the-loop feedback loops
• Support product experiments where real-time generation, summarisation, or personalisation are being tested
• Partner directly with journalists and editors to develop novel evaluation metrics that capture the nuances of our tone and style

Technologies:

• AI
• Fine-tuning
• Frontend
• Support
• LLM
• Python
• RAG
• pandas

More:

Since 1843, we have championed independence, excellence, and openness, helping people understand and tackle the critical challenges shaping the world. We are a global media and information-services company powered by digital innovation, analytical rigour, and evidence-based insight. Across our three businesses — The Economist, Economist Enterprise, and Economist Education — we deliver trusted analysis and insights to individuals and organisations in more than 170 countries. This is a full-time role at the centre of our new AI Lab, a small, dedicated team exploring how generative AI might shape the future of our journalism. Youll be one of the first three engineers in the lab, working alongside the Tech Lead, Design Lead, and Product Lead. The role operates on a hybrid working pattern, with 3+ days office attendance required. Our benefits package includes a highly competitive pension or 401(k) plan, private health insurance, 24/7 access to counselling and wellbeing resources, Work From Anywhere access for up to 25 days per year, generous annual and parental leave, volunteering and moving-home days, and free access to all of our content, including an online subscription, apps, podcasts, and more.

last updated 34 week of 2026