This is a newly-created role and a greenfield opportunity. The technical bets you make will sit behind Motorway's most strategic AI initiatives, including ones not yet started. AI engineering choices at this level shape unit economics for years.

IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:

• Set the overarching architecture for GenAI at Motorway, including reusable patterns for prompt design, RAG (hybrid retrieval, chunking, semantic caching), agent orchestration, evaluation frameworks (LLM-as-judge, golden datasets, adversarial prompts), guardrails and observability that other teams build on
• Design and build the hardest single pieces of work directly, taking on the problems nobody else is well-placed to solve and leading our highest-risk, highest-reward technical bets across the GenAI surface area
• Hold sign-off on architectural decisions for materially complex GenAI systems, with the credibility to veto implementations that don't meet our agreed technical, safety or quality bar
• Advise the Director of Data and AI on build-vs-buy calls for AI infrastructure (vector stores, eval platforms, AI gateways, model routers, agent frameworks), and own the technical rationale behind them
• Drive cost, latency and throughput optimisation across our production GenAI systems, with the trade-offs documented and explicit
• Define our principles for emerging paradigms, including multi-agent protocols, multimodal systems and agent-to-agent communication
• Define our responsible AI principles and keep us aligned with the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ICO guidance ahead of regulatory deadlines
• Own opinionated relationships with our model and infrastructure providers, with the credibility to influence vendor roadmaps where it matters to us
• Coach engineers across the function, shape how we hire and review, and set the cultural bar for safety, evaluation and production quality
• Identify what Motorway should stop pursuing with the same clarity as what we should start, and represent Motorway externally through publications, conference talks and meaningful open-source contributions, used as a multiplier for hiring and partnerships

ABOUT YOU

Typically 8+ years building production AI/ML systems, with at least 2 years at the cutting edge of GenAI, and a track record of company-scale technical bets that have materially shifted a business's trajectory

• Strong engineering fundamentals and comfort working directly in code: Python and modern API-driven architectures on cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent), with the production engineering instincts (CI/CD, observability, SLOs, cost attribution) to take prototypes through to hardened production
• Current, hands-on expertise across the GenAI stack: LLM APIs, prompt engineering, RAG (hybrid retrieval, chunking strategy, semantic caching, re-ranking), agentic architectures (multi-step, multi-agent, tool use, memory), evaluation frameworks, LLMOps and fine-tuning
• Deep understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations, including how models fail in your domain, what hallucination and prompt injection look like in practice, and how to design evals that catch them
• Experience setting architectural standards adopted across multiple engineering teams over multiple years
• High-stakes build-vs-buy judgment, with a clear story of where you've been right and where you've been wrong
• Strategic grasp of responsible AI and AI governance, with practical experience aligning engineering decisions to NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act or comparable frameworks
• Calm, direct communication with executive and board-level audiences, with the ability to compress technical complexity into the decisions leadership needs to make
• Coaching credibility with senior engineers, who have grown materially under your influence
• Self-awareness as a leadership trait; you know the limits of your knowledge and pull in outside expertise before that becomes a problem

YOU COULD BE A GREAT FIT IF

• You have an external technical presence (publications, well-known open-source contributions or conference talks) and use it as a multiplier for hiring and partnerships
• You've led an organisation through a major AI paradigm shift in a previous role
• You have working knowledge of the ML Engineering and platform layer (serving infrastructure, AI gateways, cost attribution, multi-model routing) that GenAI features run on top of
• You've advised commercial leadership on vendor and partnership strategy, including contract and data-rights negotiation
• You've worked in a regulated, safety-critical or trust-heavy domain where AI behaviour has material business or legal consequence

BENEFITS

We've got your back, in life's biggest moments and the everyday ones too.

• Competitive salary
• Equity scheme - we all share in Motorway's success
• 25 days holiday
• Flexible working (2 days a week in our London office, with socials and snacks galore)
• Private medical insurance via BUPA
• Life assurance
• Pension scheme (we contribute 5%)
• Enhanced family leave (e.g. 26 weeks full pay for maternity or adoption)
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme
• EV leasing scheme
• Cycle to work scheme
• Nursery salary sacrifice scheme
• 1 paid volunteering day a year