Applied AI Lead (AI)

Location: London, United Kingdom; hybrid

Company

hirify.global is a travel company using technology to help customers discover, book and experience holidays.

What you will do

• Lead and line-manage Applied AI engineers, including coaching, performance management, recruitment and onboarding.
• Set the team’s technical direction, delivery roadmap, priorities and capacity with business and technology stakeholders.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for applied and agentic AI workflows, integrations, automation pipelines and high-impact engineering work.
• Establish standards for building, testing and evaluating tool-using agents with Google ADK or similar frameworks, including safe tool access, human oversight and production readiness.
• Own operational performance for AI-enabled services and SaaS platforms, including service health, access, releases, usage, cost, incident escalation and continuous improvement.
• Manage third-party SaaS suppliers, contracts, licensing, renewals, commercial negotiations, service levels, spend and build-versus-buy decisions.

Requirements

• Experience line-managing engineers, coaching and developing people, managing performance and leading delivery.
• Ability to set direction, prioritise competing demands and build a collaborative, accountable team.
• Experience owning third-party supplier relationships, service reviews, escalations, licensing and renewals, with commercial judgement.
• Experience leading the administration and lifecycle management of cloud-based business systems, including configuration, user access, environments, integrations and releases.
• Strong experience delivering applied and agentic AI workflows combining models, tools and business data, including orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation.
• Ability to make architecture and build-versus-buy decisions, establish engineering standards and guide others.
• Strong hands-on engineering skills designing and reviewing REST API, webhook, event-driven and scheduled integrations between SaaS platforms, AI services and backend systems.
• Experience operating production services in cloud environments, using CI/CD, observability, incident management and secure operational practices.
• Ability to explain technical and commercial trade-offs, influence stakeholders and connect delivery to business outcomes.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Google ADK or similar frameworks.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform.

Culture & Benefits

• Inclusive, collaborative environment focused on growth, ownership and shared impact.
• Company pension contributions at 5%.
• Individualised training budget.
• Discounted holidays for employees, family and friends.
• 25 days of annual leave plus 8 public holidays, increasing with service up to 30 days; ability to buy and sell annual leave.
• Cycle to work scheme, season ticket loan and eye care vouchers.

Hiring process

• 30-minute introductory conversation with Talent Acquisition.
• One-hour video interview with the hiring manager.
• Task covering Applied AI technical leadership, team management and SaaS supplier management.
• One-hour final stage with the Director of Applied AI and senior stakeholders.