Applied AI Engineer

Location: Manchester, UK (Hybrid); office attendance is required on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with occasional travel to client sites across the UK. Candidates need 5+ years of UK residence for SC clearance after joining.

Salary: £45,000–£65,000 per year, depending on experience, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global is a Manchester-based applied AI engineering consultancy building secure, reliable AI systems, production software, evaluation solutions and cloud infrastructure for startups, global organisations, policing and secure government.

What you will do

• Work with clients to understand needs, shape ambiguous problems, run discovery workshops, present solutions and support training.
• Design, build and deploy production-grade AI systems from prototypes to secure, reliable services.
• Implement maintainable software with documentation, automated testing and observability.
• Build AI solutions using LLM applications, retrieval augmented generation, model serving, evaluation frameworks, agents, data pipelines and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Contribute to sprint planning, retrospectives, code reviews and project delivery alongside team leads.
• Participate in R&D projects, open-source work, blogs and videos focused on applied AI and MLOps.

Requirements

• Undergraduate degree in computer science, mathematics or a similar field, or a relevant postgraduate degree.
• Passion for coding, machine learning, AI and open-source technologies.
• Proven experience building production-grade software in Python, including areas such as model training, model serving, data-store integration, API development or AI-powered applications.
• Experience with machine learning or generative AI systems, including LLM applications, RAG pipelines, embeddings, prompt engineering, model evaluation, agents, model serving or ML workflows.
• Experience with cloud computing such as AWS, Google Cloud or Azure, plus modern DevOps practices and infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Experience delivering software with an agile development methodology.
• Fluency with Git, Unix/Linux, Docker and common open-source AI, ML or MLOps tools.
• Awareness of the broader AI and machine learning landscape and willingness to deepen technical knowledge.
• SC clearance is required after starting; eligibility requires 5+ years of UK residence and includes credit and criminal record checks.

Culture & Benefits

• Equity options and a genuine stake in hirify.global.
• Dedicated time for R&D, open-source work, blogs and videos.
• Modern central Manchester office with an on-site gym.
• 25 days of holiday, rising to 30 with length of service.
• £500 annual development budget plus an AI assistant of choice.
• Healthcare cash plan, enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption leave, Cycle to Work, volunteering time and company socials.

Hiring process

• Apply through the vacancy link with a few words about yourself and what interests you about the role.
• Include a link to GitHub, Bitbucket or a similar profile; Kaggle, a technical blog, side project or other relevant work may also be shared.