Lead Generative AI Engineer

Location: London, UK; hybrid work with 2 days per week in the London office

Company

hirify.global is the UK's largest online car-selling platform, connecting private sellers with more than 8,000 dealers through a technology-led marketplace.

What you will do

• Set architecture and engineering standards for complex, product-facing GenAI systems.
• Review and sign off materially complex AI systems, identifying architectural, safety, and reliability risks before production.
• Build shared foundations for retrieval, evaluation, data pipelines, and developer tooling.
• Implement difficult technical components and act as the escalation point for complex GenAI problems.
• Design systems with graceful degradation, fallback behaviour, production-scale affordability, and low latency.
• Develop senior engineers and shape hiring and engineering review standards.

Requirements

• Experience setting technical direction that engineering teams adopted, including the ability to explain successes and failures.
• Strong Python and practical SQL experience, including grounding data, golden datasets, and failure analysis.
• Deep current expertise in retrieval at scale, vector stores, agentic orchestration, multimodal systems, evaluation infrastructure, and appropriate fine-tuning.
• Fluency in MLOps tooling, deployment, and cloud infrastructure, including AWS and GCP.
• Experience designing production systems and ownership when systems failed.
• A strong perspective on evaluation and the ability to distinguish regression-detecting evaluations from reassuring but weak evaluations.
• Direct contributions that set a high quality standard for other engineers.
• Ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders without losing substance.
• Self-awareness about knowledge limits and the instinct to involve relevant expertise early.

Nice to have

• Preference for simple, effective systems over unnecessarily clever solutions.
• Experience improving other engineers through talks, reviews, or day-to-day collaboration.
• Ability to balance a two-to-three-year technical view with current delivery.

Culture & Benefits

• Player-coach environment focused on hands-on technical contribution and developing senior engineers.
• 25 days of holiday, private medical insurance via BUPA, life assurance, and a pension scheme with a 5% company contribution.
• Enhanced family leave, including up to 26 weeks of full-pay maternity or adoption leave.
• Equity scheme, EV leasing, cycle-to-work, nursery salary sacrifice, and a 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme.
• Flexible hybrid working with office socials and snacks, plus one paid volunteering day per year.