About this role
Salary: £40,000 - 70,000 per year
Requirements: At least 10 years experience across AI, data and software engineering, including 3+ years leading engineering teams or a substantial technical function within consulting or professional services.Experience operating beyond individual project leadership, with responsibility for technical direction, engineering quality or capability across multiple teams.Deep technical credibility and comfort working in production Python, substantial codebases and API-driven systems that need to perform reliably at scale.Recent, personal experience architecting and building production AI systems, including retrieval strategy, caching, context economics, serving constraints, evaluation, observability and real-world issues.Strong systems thinking and the ability to reason through unfamiliar platforms and problems.Experience leading complex programmes or multiple concurrent engineering workstreams, with accountability for technical direction, planning, resourcing, risk and delivery outcomes.The judgement to know when to intervene personally and when to lead through others, delegating effectively without giving up accountability for technical quality.Experience developing senior engineers and technical leaders, shaping team capability and raising the engineering bar across a wider organisation.Commercial awareness to turn a technical solution into a realistic scope, team shape, estimate and delivery plan, and to challenge assumptions that do not hold up.Experience contributing to account growth, technical propositions or go-to-market activity within a consulting organisation.Confidence operating with senior clients and executives while remaining credible with engineers at code and architecture level.The ability to make difficult technical calls, create clarity where there is ambiguity and take responsibility for the outcome.Strong experience with Databricks and Azure OpenAI. Responsibilities: Set technical direction across AI Engineering, defining architecture principles, engineering standards, delivery practices and technical capabilities as the practice grows.Own the technical quality of major AI engagements, particularly where architecture, scale, complexity or delivery risk requires senior leadership.Lead across multiple projects and technical workstreams, setting priorities and direction while enabling teams to execute independently.Design and review production AI architectures, including retrieval and knowledge layers, agentic pipelines, evaluation, multilingual systems, and the associated cost, latency, reliability and scalability trade-offs.Remain hands-on on the hardest problems by reviewing code, prototyping approaches, resolving architectural issues and working directly with engineers when senior technical intervention will materially improve the outcome.Run rigorous design reviews that raise the engineering bar across the practice and create an environment where technical decisions are challenged regardless of seniority.Act as a senior technical counterpart to clients, including CxO and architecture leadership, and take ownership of difficult technical conversations, trade-offs, delivery risks and changes in direction.Own the technical quality of major AI proposals, translating solution concepts into credible architectures, scopes, delivery models, team structures, estimates and commercial assumptions.Work with commercial and account leadership to shape technical propositions, identify opportunities and determine where the AI Engineering practice should invest and differentiate.Develop senior engineers and technical leads, building the leadership depth and succession required to scale the department.Shape the AI Engineering capability plan, including hiring priorities, skills development, team composition and the bar for senior technical talent. Technologies: AIAPIAzureComputer VisionDatabricksPythonCloud More:
We are Blend, an award-winning pure play data consultancy helping people do data right through project delivery across strategy and consulting, data science and BI, and data engineering. As a trusted Data & AI partner, we co-create value with clients across a wide variety of industries. We have been named on the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest Growing Companies and we have offices in Edinburgh, the US, Uruguay and India. We are an accredited Great Place To Work across all our locations, with a shared focus on DEI initiatives and representation. Our work is practical and outcome-driven, from computer vision for crop monitoring to BI dashboards that help swimmers win more medals. This is a senior AI Engineering leadership role with broad influence across technical strategy, major client engagements, engineering standards and capability growth.
last updated 33 week of 2026