Why this Principal AI Engineer position is like Padel.

There are 2 versions of this ad. Below is the anodyne version. Bonus points if you can find the more analeptic version. And provide proof of your quest. Good luck! * The Principal AI Engineer will work for a fast-paced SaaS scaleup. * The Principal AI Engineer will earn up to £200,000 per annum. * The Principal AI Engineer will enjoy hybrid working (3+2). * The Principal AI Engineer will own the technical direction of how AI gets built into our product, not as a feature, but as core infrastructure. * The Principal AI Engineer will act primarily as individual contributor but also collaborate with Design, Product and Engineering. * The Principal AI Engineer will make the calls that other engineers build against. * The Principal AI Engineer will be the ultimate judge of the art-of-the-possible vs hype. * The Principal AI Engineer will use AI-assisted development tools e.g. Claude Code. * The Principal AI Engineer will operate at the intersection of applied research and production. * The Principal AI Engineer will own the technical roadmap for AI/ML across the entire product suite, from prototyping to serving real customer traffic. * The Principal AI Engineer will work with LLMs, RAG, fine-tuning, evals, agentic workflows and choose the right tools for the task at hand. * The Principal AI Engineer will set technical standards and review architecture for other engineers building AI-adjacent features. * The Principal AI Engineer will stay up to date with the latest frontier models and have an informed view on what’s worth adopting vs discarding. * The Principal AI Engineer will have deep hands-on AI/ML expertise, with prior experience of building and shipping products from 0-1. * The Principal AI Engineer will know the fundamentals i.e. what lies under the hood of an LLM, not just how to call an API. * The Principal AI Engineer will have experience of operating with high autonomy in a fast-paced environment. * The Principal AI Engineer will have prior startup/scaleup exposure. * The Principal AI Engineer will have excellent communication skills, able to explain a technical trade-off to a non-technical stakeholder. * The Principal AI Engineer will likely boast published research or open-source contributions. * The Principal AI Engineer will work directly with founders and senior leadership on the biggest technical bets. * The Principal AI Engineer will work with teams that consider AI to be core infrastructure, rather than novelty. Think you can smash it out of the park? Then please send us a CV and a covering letter convincing us that you actually enjoyed reading the above. We look forward to hearing from you.