Job Specifications
Lead AI Engineer
Remote-first (UK - Ideally Scotland) with occasional travel to client sites and team meet-ups
£100,000-£120,000 + Benefits
Travel: Approx. 1 day per week on average
MBN have partnered exclusively with an established start up Data Consultancy.
We’re looking for an experienced, hands-on Lead AI Engineer to design, build, and scale production-grade, AI-native systems used by a global group of companies.
This is a senior technical role for someone who combines strong software engineering fundamentals with deep expertise in modern AI frameworks and LLM-driven architectures.
You’ll shape AI architecture strategy, lead delivery of real-world systems, and mentor engineers – all while staying close to the code.
This role is about building real systems in production, not just PoCs.
What You’ll Be Doing
Design and build AI-native applications and intelligent workflows in Python
Architect and deliver LLM-powered systems, agents, RAG pipelines, and orchestration layers
Lead production deployments using modern AI tooling, including:
LangChain, FastMCP, LlamaIndex
OpenAI / Anthropic / Gemini SDKs
Vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, FAISS)
Design multi-agent systems and tool-augmented workflows
Establish best practices for:
Prompt engineering
Evaluation and testing of AI systems
Observability, monitoring, and performance optimisation
Provide technical leadership and architectural oversight
Mentor engineers and raise the bar on AI engineering practices
Work closely with stakeholders to turn real business problems into scalable AI solutions
Must-Have
7+ years of software engineering experience (strong Python)
3+ years building AI/ML systems in production
Hands-on experience with:
LangChain and/or LlamaIndex
FastMCP or similar model context protocol tools
OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or similar APIs
Strong understanding of:
LLM capabilities and limitations
RAG, embeddings, vector search
Tool calling, function calling, and guardrails
Secure, production-grade AI system design
Experience integrating vector databases into real systems
Solid engineering fundamentals (CI/CD, testing, design patterns, code review)
Experience with Docker and cloud platforms (preferably Azure)
Nice to Have
Multi-agent system design and deployment
LLM evaluation frameworks (LangSmith, DeepEval, custom eval pipelines)
ML lifecycle tooling (MLflow, Weights & Biases)
Exposure to fine-tuning, LoRA, or model adaptation
Experience replacing LLM APIs with offline SLMs at scale
Startup or high-growth environment experience
Driving licence and own transport#
Why Join?
Work on AI systems that actually ship and get used
High autonomy and genuine technical ownership
Remote-first, flexible working
Projects spanning modernisation, AI transformation, and AI-native platforms
Founders and leaders who are deeply technical
No dead-end PoCs – your work goes live
What’s On Offer
10% discretionary annual bonus
35 days annual leave (including public holidays)
Pension with 5% employer contribution
Private healthcare scheme
About the Company
MBN Solutions are an innovative, disruptive Recruitment, Talent and People Solutions Consultancy.
We operate globally and work with a range of companies throughout Scotland, UK, Europe, US and Beyond.
Providing Contract, Permanent and Executive Search sourcing capabilities across the Data Science, Analytics, Technology and Digital sectors, MBN Solutions are the partner of choice for a variety of organisations in the UK, Europe and beyond who are looking for the solution to the increasingly complex challenges around Data T...
Know more