Senior AI Engineer

iO Associates are working with a UK-based company building mission-critical AI systems. They’re looking for a Senior AI Engineer to join on a contract basis and build agentic AI systems in production, including secure deployments.

Job Title: Senior AI Engineer 
Location: UK (Hybrid – occasional on-site in the South of England)
Contract Length: Initial 6 months 
IR35: Outside IR35
Rate: Dependent on experience
Start: Immediate

Key Responsibilities

• Build agent-based AI systems end-to-end. Cover orchestration, state, and tool calling.
• Engineer for production. Focus on tests, reliability, latency, and failure handling.
• Use LLMs and vision-capable models in real workflows. Include retrieval, reasoning, summarisation, and task execution.
• Deploy across cloud and restricted environments. This includes on-prem and occasional offline use.
• Set up evaluation and monitoring. Leave clear documentation for handover.

Experience & Skills Required

• Senior software engineer (around 6+ years). Strong Python.
• Proven track record shipping LLM/agentic systems to production. Not just prototypes.
• Strong retrieval/search experience at scale. Comfortable with multi-terabyte datasets.
• Confident with Docker and Git. AWS experience is a plus.
• Secure deployment experience is beneficial. Especially on-prem or controlled networks.

If this role sounds like yourself, either apply to the role or send me an email on [email protected] with your up to date CV and the best contact number and I will come back to you as soon as possible to arrange a call.

If you have someone in your network who could be a good fit, please do the same as above and we can discuss our referral scheme for successful candidates.