Lead Applied AI Engineer

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

Salary: £80,000–£100,000 per year depending on experience, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global is an Applied AI engineering consultancy delivering secure, reliable AI systems, production software, evaluations and cloud infrastructure for startups, global organisations, policing and secure government.

What you will do

• Lead an engineering squad and own technical delivery from discovery and prototyping through production, handover and ongoing improvement.
• Write production code while setting engineering quality standards and making technical decisions.
• Work directly with clients to shape ambiguous AI problems, recommend solutions and guide delivery.
• Design production-grade AI systems including LLM applications, RAG, AI agents, evaluation frameworks, model serving, cloud-native infrastructure and MLOps workflows.
• Balance speed, reliability, security, maintainability and commercial constraints; run sprint planning, retrospectives and code reviews.
• Mentor engineers, support hiring, and contribute technical input to proposals and sales.

Requirements

• Strong experience writing and deploying production-grade Python, including ML model serving, inference services, APIs or AI-powered applications.
• Hands-on experience with ML or generative AI systems such as LLM applications, RAG, embeddings, agents, model evaluation or model serving.
• Experience designing and delivering cloud systems on AWS, Google Cloud or Azure using modern DevOps and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience leading technical delivery across a project or team, including planning, technical risk management and architecture reviews.
• Experience managing or mentoring software engineers, ideally in an agile team.
• Fluency with Git, Linux, Docker and common open-source AI, ML or MLOps tools.
• Excellent communication skills with clients and within the team.
• At least 5 years of UK residence is required for the SC clearance process, including credit and criminal record checks.

Nice to have

• Experience working across software engineering, ML engineering, data science, DevOps or product delivery; an applied AI job title is not required.
• A strong opinion on the preferred code editor.

Culture & Benefits

• Dedicated time for R&D, open-source work, blogs, videos and participation in the applied AI community.
• Equity options and opportunities to take on greater technical, client and leadership responsibility.
• 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.
• Modern central Manchester office with an on-site gym and occasional UK client-site travel.

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 tech blog, side project or other relevant work may also be shared.