Nextech Group Limited
Principal AI Engineer
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Principal AI Engineer
Location: London
Salary: Up £155,000
About the Company
An ambitious, venture-backed AI technology company transforming a traditional industry through the application of cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Having secured significant early traction, they're entering an exciting phase of growth and are looking for a Principal AI Engineer to lead the evolution of their AI platform.
This is a rare opportunity to join an early-stage business where you'll have genuine ownership over the technical direction of the platform, working alongside founders and senior leadership to build AI products that deliver real commercial impact.
The Role
As Principal AI Engineer, you'll take ownership of the architecture, design and development of the company's AI platform, building the infrastructure that powers intelligent workflows, AI agents and next-generation customer experiences.
This is a highly hands-on role suited to someone who enjoys solving complex technical challenges, building scalable systems from first principles and taking AI products from concept through to production.
You'll play a key role in shaping both the technical roadmap and engineering standards while helping build a world-class AI capability.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build and scale the company's AI platform and supporting data infrastructure.
- Develop production-grade LLM applications, agentic AI systems and RAG architectures.
- Build scalable data pipelines, orchestration frameworks and AI workflows capable of supporting enterprise-scale products.
- Architect secure, multi-tenant cloud-native applications with high availability, observability and performance.
- Implement robust evaluation frameworks, monitoring, guardrails and governance for production AI systems.
- Optimise AI performance, latency and cost across multiple model providers.
- Collaborate closely with Product and Leadership teams to translate business challenges into scalable technical solutions.
- Drive engineering best practice across architecture, CI/CD, testing, security and platform reliability.
- Mentor engineers and contribute to the growth of a high-performing engineering function while remaining technically hands-on.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
Technology Stack
Experience across many of the following technologies would be advantageous:
- Python
- FastAPI
- TypeScript
- React / Next.js
- PostgreSQL
- SQL
- AWS and/or GCP
- BigQuery
- REST APIs
- ETL and Data Pipelines
- CI/CD
- LangGraph
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- OpenAI
- Anthropic
- Gemini
- RAG
- Vector Databases
- Agent Orchestration
- AI Evaluation Frameworks
- Monitoring & Observability
- Airflow or Dagster (desirable)
- Kubernetes (desirable)
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
About You
My client is looking for someone who can demonstrate:
- Extensive experience designing and deploying production AI systems.
- Strong software engineering and solution architecture expertise.
- Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications, AI agents and modern AI platforms.
- Experience designing scalable cloud-native systems and data platforms.
- A strong understanding of AI architecture, model evaluation, retrieval strategies and production deployment.
- Commercial awareness with the ability to balance technical excellence against business objectives.
- Previous experience within a startup or high-growth technology environment.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Desirable Experience
- Multi-agent AI architectures.
- Large-scale RAG implementations.
- Experience building internal AI tooling or developer platforms.
- Experience working within regulated environments.
- Previous exposure to fundraising, technical due diligence or scaling engineering teams.
- A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics or a related discipline from a leading university is highly desirable. Candidates from Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial or Warwick would be of particular interest, although equivalent commercial experience will also be considered.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills
Location