Engineering Team Lead (AI)

Location: London, UK; hybrid working with onsite attendance expected 1–3 days per week. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Salary: £90,000–£100,000 per year, plus bonus scheme.

Company

hirify.global is a data, market research and advisory company using research expertise, proprietary technology and consulting to help brands understand markets, customers and competitors.

What you will do

• Lead up to four engineers in a cross-functional agile team delivering the Virtual Personas product roadmap.
• Set technical direction and contribute to the direction of a synthetic-personas platform for market research.
• Develop full-stack features across Python/FastAPI services and React/TypeScript front ends.
• Build fast, scalable and flexible systems using Azure, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and multi-provider LLM technologies.
• Improve iterative delivery through automated testing, CI quality gates and modern development practices.
• Mentor developers, conduct regular one-to-ones, set objectives and support tailored development plans while working with customers and stakeholders.

Requirements

• Experience leading agile rapid-release iterations, ideally for fast-moving AI or LLM-powered products.
• Extensive experience with Python and modern asynchronous web frameworks, or closely related languages.
• Hands-on experience building or maintaining LLM-powered applications, including prompt design, multi-provider integration and agent orchestration.
• Strong relational database experience, such as PostgreSQL, plus experience with document stores such as MongoDB and caching layers such as Redis.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor or GitHub Copilot in daily work.
• A willingness to learn new technologies, emerging AI tooling, the business and platform, and new ways of working.
• Full product-delivery mindset focused on a tested user experience, including test-first development, high automated coverage and CI quality gates for linting, type-checking and testing.
• Ability to run project kick-offs, stakeholder check-ins and retrospectives; work with ambiguity and shifting priorities; and manage change.
• Confidence using spikes to de-risk work and guiding the team toward a scalable architecture, including hardening AI features against prompt injection and unbounded model behaviour.

Nice to have

• Experience with FastAPI, async SQLAlchemy and/or Node/Express.
• React/TypeScript front-end development experience.
• Experience with LangChain, LangGraph or other multi-agent and LLM orchestration frameworks.
• Experience configuring Azure App Service, Container Registry and Blob Storage, or AWS equivalents.
• Familiarity with LLM observability and evaluation tools such as Langfuse, plus resilience patterns for third-party AI providers such as circuit breakers and provider fallback.
• Awareness of data protection and AI transparency considerations for panel/respondent data and AI-generated outputs, including GDPR and the EU AI Act.
• Informal leadership or formal management experience.
• Experience working across team boundaries with stakeholders.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working and flexible working practices.
• Unlimited annual leave.
• Ongoing training and development, including mentoring, coaching and extensive training programmes.
• Health and wellbeing package, pension, life assurance and Employee Assistance Programme.
• Team and company socials, plus committees for health and wellbeing, charities and volunteering, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
• Entrepreneurial, inclusive and collaborative culture focused on innovation, empowerment and career development.