Lead Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Waterloo, London, United Kingdom; hybrid with a minimum of one day per week in the office

Salary: £76,023–£95,029 GBP per year for the London Lead Engineer position.

Company

hirify.global is a technology solutions consultancy founded in 2006 that partners with startups and large organisations to deliver durable software, agentic products, platforms, and engineering solutions.

What you will do

• Lead high-stakes consulting engagements from discovery through production and contribute immediately to client projects.
• Lead architecture, software design, technology choices, project roadmaps, backlogs, and delivery risk management.
• Collaborate on systems covering the full ML lifecycle, including data ingestion, preprocessing, model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring.
• Build trust with clients, maintain relationships with technical leaders, provide status updates, and balance technical, product, and user needs.
• Lead teams, facilitate retrospectives and feedback conversations, resolve blockers, and drive documented actions.
• Mentor colleagues, share knowledge, design or lead workshops, represent hirify.global in the technology community, and support hiring.

Requirements

• 7+ years of repeated success across a variety of software projects, with experience leading software development engagements.
• Experience building high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively and incrementally, using approaches tailored to client needs.
• Production-quality coding experience with multiple languages and frameworks, including Java, C#/.NET, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Go, Ruby, Rust, Scala, R, and SQL.
• Experience using AI-assistive development tools for scaffolding, refactoring, debugging, test generation, and documentation.
• Experience building or integrating AI/ML-powered features such as recommendation engines, NLP models, computer vision, or predictive analytics.
• Experience with context-appropriate automated testing, debugging and refactoring existing code, and addressing scalability, security, reliability, and performance concerns.
• Experience collaborating with Git, macOS/Linux, and CI/CD, as well as bringing together people from different functions to solve problems.
• Ability to make recommendations under ambiguity, mentor and give feedback, communicate empathetically, and balance technical considerations with product and user needs.

Nice to have

• Platform engineering, including reusable software foundations, internal developer platforms, and infrastructure for other teams.
• Data engineering, including Databricks for data processing and analytics.
• Production agentic systems, including RAG pipelines, vector search, and frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGen, and n8n.
• DevSecOps, DevOps, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code.

Culture & Benefits

• Open, collaborative culture focused on honesty, continuous education, mentorship, hands-on work, and inclusive growth.
• Unlimited access to books, courses, and expert-led training through the O'Reilly learning platform.
• Annual financial stipend and dedicated time for learning and development.
• Coworking support for the global team and a London hybrid model with one weekly Waterloo office day.
• 12 weeks of new parent leave for eligible employees.
• Consulting engagements generally do not require travel.

Hiring process

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