Staff Machine Learning Engineer | Permanent | Up to £160,000 + Bonus
Location: Hybrid – London (3 days per week on-site)
Salary: Up to £160,000 + c.20% bonus + additional benefits
Employment: Permanent
We're supporting a major UK financial services organisation as they scale their AI engineering capability and accelerate the adoption of
Generative AI and Agentic AI across the business.
We're looking for an exceptional
Staff Machine Learning Engineer who combines deep hands-on engineering expertise with the technical leadership to shape how AI is developed, deployed and adopted across multiple engineering teams.
This is a high-impact opportunity to help drive the organisation's UK AI agenda, leveraging established capabilities from its US operations while developing new solutions, engineering frameworks and use cases.
Crucially, this is a
hands-on technical leadership role, not a purely strategic or management position.
The opportunityYou'll play a central role in building and scaling enterprise AI capabilities, moving beyond conventional RAG and LLM applications towards increasingly sophisticated, high-complexity AI systems.
Working across multiple engineering teams, you'll help establish reusable AI engineering capabilities, accelerate delivery and drive the adoption of modern AI development practices within a highly regulated environment.
Key responsibilities: - Providing Staff-level technical leadership across Generative AI, LLM and Agentic AI initiatives.
- Designing and developing production-grade RAG, LLM and multi-agent solutions.
- Shaping reusable AI frameworks, tooling and engineering standards across multiple teams.
- Remaining deeply hands-on, developing and deploying complex AI applications.
- Supporting the evolution towards higher-risk and higher-complexity AI use cases.
- Championing AI-assisted development tools to accelerate engineering delivery.
- Collaborating with senior technical stakeholders to identify opportunities, challenge approaches and drive adoption.
- Ensuring AI solutions meet the reliability, scalability and governance requirements of a regulated organisation.
What we're looking for - Extensive hands-on Machine Learning Engineering and Applied AI experience.
- Deep expertise in LLMs, Generative AI, RAG and agentic architectures.
- Practical experience with frameworks such as LangChain and LangGraph, alongside vector databases and associated technologies.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, particularly Python.
- Experience designing and deploying complex AI applications into production environments.
- Experience with AWS, MLOps and enterprise-scale AI infrastructure.
- Experience operating at Staff, Principal or equivalent technical leadership level.
- Ability to influence technical direction across multiple engineering teams while remaining genuinely hands-on.
- Strong understanding of AI governance, evaluation, reliability and deployment considerations.
- Experience using modern AI development tools, such as Claude Code, to improve engineering productivity.
Experience delivering AI solutions within financial services or another highly regulated environment would be particularly beneficial.
Why consider this opportunity?This is an opportunity to take a leading technical role in an organisation making a significant investment in AI.
You'll have the chance to influence the direction of enterprise AI adoption in the UK, work on increasingly complex AI applications and help establish engineering capabilities that will be adopted across the wider business.
We're particularly interested in engineers who enjoy
solving difficult technical problems, experimenting with emerging technologies and translating cutting-edge AI capabilities into real-world production systems.
Salary: Up to £160,000 + c.20% bonus and additional benefits
If you're a Staff or Principal-level engineer who wants to remain deeply technical while having a meaningful influence on an organisation's AI strategy and engineering direction, we'd be keen to speak with you.