Lead AI Engineer

Lead AI Engineer Remote UK £100,000–£120,000 + Equity Neulinx is working with a well-established SaaS company entering a major AI transformation phase. The platform is already used by large enterprise customers globally and is now evolving from traditional analytics into AI-driven products, including real-time insights, recommendation systems and agent-based automation over live business data. They are hiring a Lead AI Engineer to own the core data and AI infrastructure enabling this shift. This is not an LLM integration or prompt engineering role. You’ll focus on the underlying platform: how data is structured, governed and exposed safely and reliably to AI systems and agents. What you’ll do * Own the architecture for data and AI systems across the platform * Build batch and streaming pipelines for real-time use cases * Design data layers for agents, search and retrieval systems, including MCP-style tooling * Define schemas, contracts and data governance standards * Lead decisions across storage, search and data infrastructure * Implement observability, lineage and data quality controls * Ensure secure, privacy-aware AI system design, including guardrails and prompt injection protection * Work cross-functionally and influence architecture without formal authority * Stay hands-on while shaping the long-term technical direction What they’re looking for Strong experience owning data or AI platforms within production SaaS environments, with exposure to several of the following: * LLM applications, AI agents or orchestration frameworks * MCP or similar tool and agent architectures * Distributed systems and large-scale data pipelines * PostgreSQL, MongoDB or DocumentDB, MySQL and Redshift * Elasticsearch or search and retrieval systems * AWS, including Kinesis, Lambda, SQS and SNS * Kubernetes or EKS, Terraform and CI/CD * Redis or ElastiCache * TypeScript and Node.js * Observability tools, including Datadog, Sentry, logging, tracing and SLOs * AI safety, governance, GDPR and secure data handling You don’t need experience with everything listed, but you should have a track record of turning complex and ambiguous requirements into scalable platform architecture. Why this role? You’ll be shaping the AI foundations of a proven, revenue-generating SaaS platform rather than working on early-stage experimentation. There is real ownership, strong engineering autonomy and direct influence over how AI is embedded across a product used at global scale. Of interest? Apply and upload your CV, or reach out to Gareth at Neulinx directly for a confidential conversation.