AI Engineering Lead
Based in either Leicester or London, with hybrid (home/office) working.
The AI Engineering Lead is a senior technical role at the heart of Bellrock's internal AI capability. You will own the engineering architecture that turns AI ideas and use cases into production-ready systems. Working closely with the Head of AI and a team of AI Graduates, you will design, build, and operate the technical infrastructure that powers AI across our internal operations. This is a hands-on leadership role — you will be the most senior technical voice in the internal AI team, making critical decisions about tooling, integrations, security boundaries, and architecture, while also mentoring graduates and guiding delivery.
Key responsibilities:
- Own the technical architecture for Bellrock's internal AI systems, including agentic workflows, automation pipelines, and integrations with internal platforms and data sources.
- Lead the engineering build of AI use cases from prototype to production, ensuring solutions are robust, secure, and maintainable.
- Define and enforce engineering standards, including data handling, model access, API integration, prompt engineering, and tool use boundaries.
- Evaluate and select appropriate AI tooling, platforms, and frameworks, with a pragmatic focus on foundation model APIs, orchestration layers, and integration patterns.
- Collaborate closely with the AI Delivery Manager to translate scoped use cases into technical delivery plans with clear milestones.
- Act as a senior technical counterpart to the Head of AI on governance and risk matters — contributing to the AI risk assessment process, supporting data residency compliance, and advising on agentic AI safeguards such as least privilege, reversibility, and kill-switch mechanisms.
- Mentor and technically develop a team of AI Graduate Analysts, broadening their engineering thinking and hands-on capability.
- Stay current with the rapidly evolving AI engineering landscape and bring relevant innovations into Bellrock's internal practice.
Skills & experience:
- Proven experience building and deploying AI-powered applications using foundation model APIs (e.g. Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Azure, AWS).
- Strong proficiency in Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript; experience with agentic frameworks and orchestration tools (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex, or equivalent).
- Hands-on experience integrating AI systems with enterprise platforms, APIs, and data pipelines.
- Solid understanding of prompt engineering, RAG (retrieval-augmented generation), and tool/function calling patterns.
- Experience working within information security and data governance constraints, including an understanding of data residency and access control principles.
- Excellent communication skills, be able to explain technical architecture to non-technical stakeholders and translate business requirements into engineering decisions.
- Experience mentoring junior engineers or analysts.
- Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar tool-use frameworks is desirable but not essential.
- You drive AI use cases from approved scope to production reliably and securely, you make things happen.
- You build coherent, well-documented technical architectures that scale as the use case pipeline grows.
- You develop others, Graduate Analysts in your team grow their engineering thinking and build with greater confidence and rigour under your guidance.
- You operate with integrity: AI systems you build consistently respect agreed governance, data handling, and security boundaries.
- You thrive with autonomy and take ownership of hard technical decisions, while staying collaborative and clearly communicating your reasoning.
AI fluency & learning mindset: We are looking for people who actively use AI in their day‑to‑day work, demonstrate strong curiosity about new technologies, and take ownership for continuously improving how they think, work, and deliver.
Working arrangements
We embrace smarter working practices which offer our employees the opportunity to work their hours flexibly and remotely where their roles and business needs allow. In this role, we are open to the successful candidate being based from the Leicester or London office on a hybrid basis (this is not a dual office role).
What can we offer you?
Upon joining Bellrock, you can expect a comprehensive benefits package including:
25 days annual leave plus bank holidays + 1 additional day as a thank you (enjoy it, it’s on us)
Salary exchange pension scheme
Life cover
Paid sick leave
Health Assured employee assistance and wellness program
Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption leave
Salary sacrifice schemes: Cycle to work
Holiday purchase scheme of additional 5 days per year
Offers and discount scheme designed to save money on everyday shopping and essentials
Healthcare Cashplan
MotorSave Scheme
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Why Bellrock?
Our people are our passion, so we’re all about helping them to achieve their ambitions. That means putting everything in place for you to have a rewarding career with us. So you can go far in your career, with us behind you. And our business will grow, too. So, if you’re ready to start your career journey with Bellrock we’re ready to welcome you. It’s a great place to be.
We would like to attract talent from all corners of the world for this role. Or commitment is to an equitable recruitment process so feel free to apply in any way that suits you. We are looking for the right person, not necessarily just the right person for this role
Apply today.
