Principal Software Engineer / Principal AI Engineer - London

Salary: £65,000 - 105,000 per year

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including hands-on AI system design, development, or integration, and a record of taking AI prototypes into production in enterprise environments.
• BS in Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent; an advanced degree is preferred.
• Experience with LLM orchestration, prompt engineering, context-window management, production guardrails, MCP, tool-augmented agents, and enterprise-scale RAG.
• Experience integrating AI into enterprise systems through APIs and data pipelines, with strong security, data governance, and data residency practices.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, including managed AI/ML services.
• Familiarity with Agile, CI/CD, modern SDLC, and TDD.
• Data modeling experience across relational, columnar, and vector stores, grounded in sound architectural principles.
• Ability to work through ambiguity, define problems and specifications, and prioritize shipping validated outcomes and moving pilots into production.
• Proficiency in Python, Java, TypeScript/JavaScript, SQL, and relevant AI SDKs.
• Ability to plan and sequence work, manage scope, dependencies, and priorities, remove blockers, and drive delivery.
• Strong communication and influencing skills, including presenting to senior management, stakeholders, and cross-functional teams and building support for technical decisions.
• Commercial and budget awareness, including partnering with internal and external resources such as managed services and staff augmentation.
• Ability to establish baselines and instrument solutions to track productivity, cost, and quality outcomes from pilot through scale.

Responsibilities:

• Lead technical execution for an embedded Innovation Squad from discovery through production.
• Build, assess, and harden AI prototypes and proofs of concept, and deliver new solutions.
• Design and govern reusable agentic AI patterns for orchestration, tool use, memory, and retrieval.
• Ensure delivery meets architecture, security, and data-governance standards; recommend infrastructure, hosting, and data residency approaches.
• Turn validated solutions into reusable patterns, reference implementations, and starter kits for adoption and scaling across functions.
• Provide design input, finalize requirements, and work directly with internal stakeholders and end users in the host function.
• Write specifications, fix complex bugs, and design complex data models.
• Serve as the primary technical contact for external resources and the squads coding and AI expert.
• Establish baselines and report measurable outcomes for each initiative.
• Track AI pilots within the function to prevent duplication and identify opportunities for reuse.
• Maintain alignment with enterprise security, compliance, and central technology infrastructure standards.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and mentor and develop team members.
• Take on related responsibilities as the squads needs evolve.

Technologies:

• Agentic AI
• AI
• AWS
• Azure
• CI/CD
• Embedded
• GCP
• Support
• Java
• JavaScript
• LLM
• MCP
• Python
• RAG
• SQL
• Security
• TDD
• TypeScript
• Cloud

More:

We are hiring a Principal Software Engineer / Principal AI Engineer for our Embedded Innovation Teams, cross-functional squads embedded within our business segments. We work problem-first to turn internal AI experimentation into validated, reusable solutions, improve internal workflows, and help our people deliver better customer outcomes faster. The role is based in London Wall and is full time. We are a global leader in information and analytics, combining trusted information and extensive data with analytics to support science and research, health education, interactive learning, and healthcare. At Elsevier, our work contributes to major global challenges and a more sustainable future. We offer flexible working hours, wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance, sabbaticals, a pension plan, generous vacation, family-care leave, a personal choice budget, employee communities and networks, discounts, an employee referral reward, and a global Employee Assistance Program. Benefits vary by country. We are an equal opportunity employer and are committed to a fair and accessible hiring process.

last updated 39 week of 2026