Savanta
Engineering Team Lead (AI Focused)
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Savanta is looking for an experienced engineering team lead to lead an agile team building a cutting-edge AI platform for market research.
About Us:
Savanta is a leading data, market research and advisory company helping the world's leading brands make better decisions, faster. With over 500 people across offices in multiple countries, we combine deep research expertise, proprietary technology and high-impact consulting to give our clients a complete view of their markets, their customers and their competitors.
About the Role:
Modern AI has created new possibilities in market research, the ability to use real world market data and AI models to generate synthetic responses to market research questions. You will lead the team responsible for Virtual Personas, Savanta’s synthetic personas solution built using our unique data set.
This role is based in our London office, with the expectation to be onsite 1-3 days per week.
You will lead up to 4 engineers working in a cross functional agile team alongside a product manager, with input from our UX designer and QA teams. The team is to deliver the product roadmap alongside driving further adoption of cloud first technologies; we are Azure based, with PostgreSQL and MongoDB as our primary data stores and a multi-provider LLM stack (OpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic).
We want you to dive in, get your hands dirty, and figure things out, but also to be someone your team can rely on for help and guidance when they need it.
Our Tech Team works within a learning and collaborative environment, where empowerment is key to our success, along with developing a culture of innovation and creating an environment where everyone can excel.
This is a great opportunity to lead engineering in a totally new field using cutting edge technology. Virtual Personas sits at the frontier of applied AI in the industry and has the potential to fundamentally change the way market research is done. Savanta intends to be a pioneer in this area and is putting in the investment to ensure that happens.
You'll also be responsible for:
- Part of a team responsible for setting direction for Virtual Personas
- Delivery of the Product roadmap
- Managing a team consisting of a range of skillsets and experience
- Full stack development, across Python/FastAPI services and React/TypeScript front ends
- Continuously improving the team's processes for iterative development, including embedding automated testing and CI quality gates into a fast-moving AI product
- Championing the responsible and secure use of LLMs - including prompt-injection awareness, defensive design, and sound data handling for personas built on real respondent data
- Setting technical direction for the team
- Interacting directly with customers, understanding their needs, and generalising them
- Finding ways to build fast, scalable, flexible systems without blowing the budget
- Mentoring, supporting, and encouraging our developers
- Conducting regular 121's, setting objectives and assisting with tailored development plans
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Our engineering environment includes technologies such as Python (FastAPI), LangChain/ LangGraph for multi-agent LLM orchestration, React/TypeScript, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Azure (App Service, Container Registry, Blob Storage), Docker, GitHub Actions, and modern CI/CD pipelines.
About You:
You will have a strong engineering background, and a track record of leading teams that have launched and scaled up new products while maintaining good engineering practices. You will be innovative and comfortable with working in a rapidly evolving business area.
Essential Criteria:
- Experience leading agile rapid release iterations, ideally on fast-moving AI/LLM-powered products
- Extensive experience specifically with Python and modern async web frameworks, or experience in closely related languages
- Hands-on experience building or maintaining LLM-powered applications - prompt design, multi-provider integration, and agent orchestration (e.g. LangChain/ LangGraph or an equivalent framework)
- Strong RDBMS experience (e.g. PostgreSQL) and comfort with document stores (e.g. MongoDB) and caching layers (e.g. Redis)
- Comfortable working with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) as part of the daily workflow
- A willingness to learn - new technologies (including emerging AI tooling), our business and platform, and ways of working - is an absolute must
- Full product delivery mindset focused on a tested user experience
- Encourages a test-first approach as part of stories, aiming for high automated coverage, and comfortable establishing CI quality gates (lint, type-check, test) where they don't yet exist
- Runs meetings such as project kick-offs, stakeholder check-ins, and retrospectives
- Comfortable with some ambiguity and shifting priorities in your work environment, and comfortable with managed change
- Confident in using spikes to de-risk work as well as guiding the team in iterating towards a long-term scalable architecture - including hardening AI features against risks such as prompt injection and unbounded model behaviour
Desirable Criteria:
- Experience with FastAPI, async SQLAlchemy, and/or Node/Express
- Experience with React/TypeScript front-end development
- Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, or other multi-agent/LLM orchestration frameworks
- Experience configuring Azure services (App Service, Container Registry, Blob Storage) or AWS equivalents
- Familiarity with LLM observability/evaluation tooling (e.g. Langfuse) and resilience patterns for third-party AI providers (e.g. circuit breakers, provider fallback)
- Awareness of data protection and AI transparency considerations relevant to handling panel/respondent data and AI-generated outputs (e.g. GDPR, EU AI Act) - as context for engineering decisions, not as a compliance determination
- Experience/interest of informal leadership or formal management experience
- Experience working across team boundaries with stakeholders
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And in return, Savanta offers:
- Salary range: £90,000 - £100,000
- Bonus scheme
- Unlimited annual leave
- Hybrid working
- Flexible working practices
- Ongoing Training & Development
- Health & Wellbeing package
- Financial Health (pension, life assurance, etc.)
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Team & Company Socials
- Committees for Health & Well Being, Charities & Volunteering and DE&I
Why Join Us:
Part of the vibrant Next 15 Communications Group, we have an entrepreneurial and inclusive company culture that actively recognizes and values its people and offers unrivalled scope for career development, including mentoring, coaching as well as extensive training programs.
The company was founded on the belief that tech should be integral to its success, and this culture of tech innovation makes us best placed to put Savanta at the heart of our clients’ businesses offering solutions before they even know the problem.
Savanta is committed to being an equal opportunities employer and continuously strives to be an employer of choice. Our people are our greatest asset - we value workplace diversity and inclusion, oppose all forms of unlawful discrimination, and welcome applications from suitably qualified candidates of all backgrounds.
All candidates will be considered equally, however, unfortunately we are unable to offer visa sponsorship.
We encourage authentic responses that reflect your own experience and approach. Candidates should avoid relying on Generative AI to fully create cover letters or application responses, as this may be considered during the review process.
For information on how Savanta uses your data, please see https://savanta.com/about/careers/job-opportunities
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