Senior Applied AI Engineer (Software)

Location: Manchester, UK (hybrid); office attendance on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with occasional travel 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 a Manchester-based Applied AI engineering consultancy delivering secure, reliable AI systems from research and prototypes through to production software, evaluation and cloud infrastructure.

What you will do

• Design and build reliable production software around AI capabilities.
• Turn prototypes and experiments into maintainable systems, including APIs, services, integrations, data pipelines and user-facing features.
• Work with LLMs, model APIs, RAG, embeddings, structured outputs, agents and tool use.
• Develop evaluation and testing approaches for non-deterministic systems.
• Deploy and operate systems using cloud, container and infrastructure practices.
• Work with customers to turn ambiguous requirements into working software and contribute software engineering expertise to multidisciplinary teams.

Requirements

• Strong experience building and operating production software.
• Strong programming skills with excellent Python knowledge as a core requirement; additional experience with TypeScript, Java, Go or C# is highly valued.
• Strong understanding of software design, APIs, testing, debugging and maintainable code.
• Experience with cloud platforms, modern software delivery practices and CI/CD build pipelines.
• Experience taking software from development through to production.
• Strong appetite for solving complex problems and learning new skills.
• Evidence of active development in Applied AI, such as LLM, RAG, semantic search, agentic systems, structured tool use, model evaluation, monitoring, AI side projects or open-source AI work.
• Must have 5+ years of UK residence for the required SC clearance process, including credit and criminal record checks.

Nice to have

• Commercial AI experience.
• Personal experimentation, side projects or open-source work in AI, LLM or ML.

Culture & Benefits

• Dedicated time for R&D, open-source work, blogs and videos.
• Opportunities to grow technical, client and leadership responsibility.
• Equity options and a genuine stake in hirify.global.
• 25 days of holiday, rising to 30 with length of service; healthcare cash plan and enhanced family leave.
• £500 annual development budget, AI assistant allowance, Cycle to Work, volunteering time and company socials.
• Modern central Manchester office with an on-site gym.

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.