Senior Applied AI Engineer

Location: Manchester, UK (Hybrid); office attendance on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with occasional visits to client sites across the UK. SC clearance is required after starting, and candidates must have 5+ years of UK residence.

Salary: £65,000–£80,000 per year, depending on experience, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global is an Applied AI engineering consultancy delivering research, prototypes, production software, AI evaluation and cloud infrastructure for startups, global organisations, policing and secure government.

What you will do

• Work with clients to understand needs, shape ambiguous problems, lead demos and discovery workshops, visit customer sites when useful, and support training sessions.
• Own technical workstreams from discovery and prototyping through the design, build and deployment of secure, reliable, production-grade AI systems.
• Design and implement maintainable features and workstreams with documentation, automated testing, observability and clear technical decisions.
• Build AI solutions using techniques and tooling such as LLM applications, RAG, model serving, evaluation frameworks, AI agents, data pipelines and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Plan implementation, manage delivery risks, contribute to agile ceremonies and code reviews, and maintain high engineering standards.
• Support and mentor engineers, contribute to R&D, open-source work, blogs and videos, and share applied AI learnings.

Requirements

• Undergraduate degree in computer science, mathematics or a similar subject, or a relevant postgraduate degree.
• Strong experience building production-grade software in Python, including areas such as model training and serving, inference services, data stores, APIs 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 designing and delivering cloud-based systems using AWS, Google Cloud or Azure, with modern DevOps practices and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Experience making technical decisions across a project or workstream while balancing delivery speed, reliability, security, maintainability and customer needs.
• 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 broad AI and machine learning landscape, with willingness to deepen technical knowledge.
• Strong engineering foundations, leadership experience and the ability to learn quickly are valued; applied AI experience or that exact job title is not required.

Nice to have

• Experience or interest spanning software engineering, ML engineering, data science, DevOps and product delivery.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work from a modern central Manchester office with an on-site gym; office days are Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.
• Equity options providing a genuine stake in hirify.global.
• 25 days of holiday, rising to 30 with length of service.
• £500 annual development budget plus the AI assistant(s) of your choice.
• Healthcare cash plan, enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption leave, Cycle to Work, volunteering time and company socials.
• Dedicated time for R&D, open-source work, blogs and videos, with opportunities to grow technical, client and leadership responsibility.

Hiring process

• Apply through the careers 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.