We are looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to join our Engineering Community and help shape and deliver AI-powered solutions across our large-scale, operationally critical client projects.
We've had some significant AI wins over the last couple of years — deploying AI into the NHS, helping energy providers transform how they process customer data, and most recently winning a place on Yorkshire Water's AI Framework.
This is a senior, hands-on, client-facing role focused on building production-grade AI systems that deliver measurable impact.
What you'll actually do
Design and build LLM-based applications: RAG pipelines, agentic workflows (LangGraph and similar), structured generation, evaluation frameworks
Make architectural decisions that hold up in production - chunking strategy, retrieval design, model selection, observability, cost
Build the evaluation harnesses that let us prove a system works before it goes live, and keep working after it does
Work directly with clients in discovery workshops, scoping sessions and delivery - translating "we want to use AI to do X" into a buildable backlog
Mentor mid-level engineers in our Engineering Community as our AI capability grows
Pair with our pre-sales team on bids and shape technical responses to public sector procurements
What we're looking for
You've built and shipped production LLM systems. You can talk in detail about the decisions you made and what you'd do differently. Specifically:
Hands-on experience with at least one major model family (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Llama, Mistral) in a production setting — including the unglamorous parts: latency, cost, prompt versioning, regression testing
Experience designing RAG systems beyond the tutorial level — chunking trade-offs, hybrid search, re-ranking, evaluation
Experience with at least one agent framework (LangGraph, LlamaIndex, or your own) and a clear view on when agents are the right tool versus when they're overkill
Comfortable working with vector stores (Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, pgVector, or similar)
Solid software engineering fundamentals — testing, CI/CD, observability — applied to non-deterministic systems
Comfortable in client-facing settings, including running technical workshops and explaining trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
Bonus points for any of
NHS or wider public sector delivery experience, or familiarity with frameworks like DTAC, DCB0129, DSPT
Experience with speech-to-text / text-to-speech integration
Multi-modal work (vision models, document extraction, OCR)
Knowledge graphs alongside vector retrieval
Experience with sovereign cloud or in-estate model deployment
The perks of being @ Answer
We’re an Employee-Owned Company. After 12 months – through the Employee Ownership Trust you will be part of the ownership of Answer; a major factor in driving engagement, retention and growth for our people
Competitive salary
Flexible annual leave (buy/sell and carry forward)
Twice a year income-tax free bonus based on company performance - it’s a reward for being a part of our EOT journey
Continuous training and development - if you want to learn, we’ll provide the support you need
Flexible Pension - we match your own contributions up to 5%
A flexible Healthcare cash plan so you can fund the care you value most
A packed social calendar including; end of year party (partners invited) and Summer away days, monthly and quarterly company team socials.
Parking at Head Offices in central Leeds, plus Cycle2Work & Green Car Lease schemes to help get you here
The chance to give back – get involved nationally and regionally with partnerships to get people from different backgrounds into tech, as well as lots of charity and community events
Diversity and Inclusion
At Answer we proudly embrace diversity and inclusion - we want to create a safe environment for everyone to bring their true selves to work.
We will do everything we can to support your application. If you require any adjustments to be made to your application…