AI Engineer, Senior Associate

Role

We are hiring an AI Engineer (Senior Associate) to own end-to-end delivery of AI features: from ingesting and cleaning unstructured data, to building and operating RAG pipelines, integrating LLMs, designing agentic workflows, and shipping well-tested backend APIs into production. The role sits between research and engineering and emphasizes production reliability, security, and product thinking.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines over unstructured data (PDFs, HTML, emails, transcripts, APIs) using embeddings, vector databases and graph databases.
• Implement and tune chunking strategies and retrieval techniques to preserve context and improve quality.
• Integrate LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source) via SDKs/HTTP and handle context windows, rate limits, retries, timeouts, and graceful degradation.
• Design multi-agent / agentic workflows, handle conversation state management, tool routing, and agent hand-offs.
• Implement security and governance controls (prompt-injection defenses, output filtering, role/permissioning, data privacy/GDPR/SOC2 awareness).
• Fine-tune or adapt open-source models and manage training/inference pipelines; experiment with architectures and hosted APIs.
• Build ETL jobs and ingestion scripts to clean, normalize, and enrich text data; work with SQL and vector stores.
• Own prompt design, evaluation, and regression testing for AI features, and monitor/diagnose production behavior (hallucinations, latency, accuracy).
• Build and maintain typed, tested backend services exposing AI capabilities (APIs/microservices) and implement observability (logging, metrics, tracing, token usage).
• Collaborate with product, design, and ops, and take end-to-end ownership from prototype to production and continuous improvement.

Requirements

Technical

• Approximately 3+ years professional software engineering experience, including ~1–2 years building production AI/ML or LLM-based systems (non-traditional equivalents considered).
• Expert proficiency in Python for backend and data work (typing, async, packaging, testing, profiling).
• Hands-on experience with at least one orchestration framework (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex).
• Practical experience implementing RAG with embeddings and vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, Milvus, Qdrant) and semantic search.
• Comfortable using Graph DBs (PuppyGraph, Neo4J, TigerGraph, ArangoDB) and SQL; experience with pandas/BeautifulSoup or equivalents for preprocessing.
• Experience building and deploying APIs/microservices (REST, JSON, auth, rate limiting, pagination, error handling).
• Familiarity with software engineering fundamentals: testing, code reviews, version control (Git), CI/CD, and basic cloud services (AWS/GCP/Azure).
• Experience with Azure AI tools; nice-to-have: Microsoft Power Platform (Power Automate, Power Apps, Dataverse), Azure Logic Apps.
• Nice-to-have: experience with IAC tools (Terraform, Crossplane), AI infrastructure for scalable serving, distributed training, GPU orchestration, and knowledge of MCP.

AI/ML Understanding & Soft Skills

• Working understanding of LLM behavior: context windows, tokens, temperature/top-p, hallucinations, prompt injection risks, embeddings, vector similarity, and Transformer concepts.
• Experience shipping production AI features (e.g., RAG chatbots, summarization/search assistants, agentic workflows); portfolio or GitHub preferred.
• Strong problem-solving, product thinking, experimentation mindset, and ability to explain AI concepts to stakeholders.
• AI scepticism: verify AI outputs, design guardrails, and apply rigorous human review.

Benefits

• Private medical and life insurance
• Income protection
• Pension contributions
• Wellness benefits via partner organisations
• Volunteer day and global philanthropy program
• Professional development and career progression opportunities
• Competitive compensation, flexible “results-focused” working model, and social events

Location & Contact

• Location: London
• To apply: send CV and cover letter to [email protected] with subject “AI Engineer, Senior Associate, London”. Further information at www.partners-cap.com