Senior/Lead AI Engineer - Manchester

Senior / Lead AI Engineer
Manchester | Two office days per week | Permanent
Circa £80,000 Senior / £90,000–£95,000 Lead

You’ve proved you can build AI applications. Your next move should give you more say in how they’re delivered.

If you enjoy taking an idea, figuring out what works and making it reliable enough for people to use, these roles are worth exploring.

You’ll join a small, experienced engineering team where you’re trusted to make decisions and own your work through to completion. There are projects ready to pick up, with room to influence the approach.

You’ll work on AI applications, agents and automation, tackling the questions that come with getting them into production: How do you know the output is good enough? What happens when something fails? How do you improve quality without making the system slower or more expensive?

You’ll have colleagues to work through those problems with, access to AI tools and models, and support for learning through training, technical discussions and conferences.

At Senior level, you’ll take ownership of delivery and contribute to technical decisions.

At Lead level, you’ll stay hands-on while helping set direction, improve engineering standards and develop others.

You’ll need experience shipping AI applications and a practical understanding of evaluations, testing and operating them once they’re live. Agents, RAG or LLM-powered systems are particularly relevant.

Your exact language or framework background is flexible. Strong engineering judgement, curiosity and the ability to learn quickly matter more than matching every technology on a list.

Both opportunities involve two days a week in Manchester.

If this sounds like the kind of team you’d enjoy working with, contact Michael Collins at iO Associates. We can talk through the work and whether it offers what you want from your next move.