About this role
Salary: £? - ? per year
Requirements
- Robust software engineering experience developing LLM-powered or agentic systems, with a track record operating at senior or lead level
- Strong engineering fundamentals, including writing clean, tested, maintainable code
- Commercial experience building and owning multi-agent or agentic AI systems in live production settings as an engineer
- Strong Python skills and experience with LangGraph, LangChain, Haystack, or similar frameworks, with the ability to work below the framework when appropriate
- Real-world experience deploying AI/ML systems to production, beyond notebooks and proof-of-concepts
- Confidence in inference performance, data pipeline design, state and memory handling, and tool or function calling
- Experience building retrieval and search over very large multimodal datasets, including indexing and embedding at scale
- Experience with Docker, Git, and cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS
- Understanding of secure deployment approaches, including on-premises and sovereign cloud
- Desirable: biotech, pharma, or life sciences experience; multimodal reasoning; Kubernetes (EKS or OpenShift); MLOps, including evaluation, monitoring, and reproducibility; observability for agentic systems; agent-to-agent orchestration protocols or MCP; secure-by-design frameworks such as ISO 27001, NIST, or OWASP; or open-source AI/ML contributions
Responsibilities
- Architect and build end-to-end multi-agent AI systems, combining frameworks such as LangGraph or Haystack with bespoke orchestration, state management, and tool-calling logic where appropriate
- Write production-grade code with reliability, latency, and graceful failure handling designed in from the outset
- Embed LLMs and vision-language models into live reasoning, search, summarisation, and task-execution workflows, supported by retrieval, memory, and guardrail design
- Deploy systems across cloud and on-premises environments, adapting to security and connectivity constraints
- Own production pipelines end to end, from raw data ingestion through to live inference
- Build monitoring, evaluation, and guardrail tooling to assess system performance in the field
- Set technical standards for agentic AI within the team, establish reusable engineering patterns, and provide clear documentation
Technologies
- Agentic AI
- AI
- AWS
- Architect
- Cloud
- Docker
- Git
- Kubernetes
- LLM
- MCP
- MLOps
- OWASP
- OpenShift
- Python
- Security
More
We are recruiting for a Senior Applied AI Engineer on a contract basis for a rapidly scaling UK deep-tech company delivering advanced agentic AI capabilities. The role is part of its AI team and involves working with a commercial customer in biotech and pharma, with significant influence over the architecture and delivery of the platforms agentic AI systems. The engagement is outside IR35, initially for six months with a strong likelihood of extension, at £700–£900 per day depending on experience. The role is based in Oxfordshire, hybrid, with two days per week on site. We are Deerfoot Recruitment Solutions Ltd, an independent UK technology recruitment consultancy. For every CV we send to clients, we donate £1 to The Born Free Foundation, and we are a Climate Action Workforce in partnership with Ecologi.
last updated 43 week of 2026