Principal AI Engineer - Lead Colleague AI Transformation

Location: London

Role Type: Contract Inside IR35 Via Rockford Payroll

Overall Purpose of the Role

We are seeking a hands-on Principal AI Engineer to act as the technical right hand for the Automation & AI Practice, accelerating the Colleague AI agenda. This pivotal role will transition the organisation from isolated AI experiments to a fully resourced, governed, and scalable AI delivery capability. You will seed in-house expertise to reduce vendor dependency, mitigate key person risk, and govern shadow AI usage across the business.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on technical leadership across Colleague AI initiatives including Sierra PoC and Claude roll-out, owning architecture and design.
  
• Drive the build of agentic AI solutions for Tribeless colleagues.
  
• Consult on the broader Colleague AI backlog (complaint triage, helpdesk assistant, inbox routing, QA/QC), ensuring solutions are fit for purpose, secure, low risk, and cost-efficient amid consumption-based AI pricing.
  
• Define and embed AI engineering standards, reference architectures, and reusable patterns, collaborating with infrastructure teams to govern shadow AI usage.
  
• Lead AI literacy and enablement across Digital and the wider business.
  
• Mentor and uplift the Automation Practice team to diffuse AI capability and support transition to a permanent in-house AI Engineering Manager.
  
• Represent the Automation & AI Practice in cross-functional forums, translating AI strategy into delivery roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
  

Skills & Experience Required

• Deep, hands-on technical leadership experience at Principal/Lead level.
  
• Strong expertise in Generative AI, LLMs, agentic architectures, and multi-agent systems with proven production delivery in regulated environments (FS preferred).
  
• Proven experience building agentic solutions using Microsoft Copilot Studio/Foundry, AWS Bedrock/AgentCore, and frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, Strands.
  
• Comfortable across Microsoft and AWS cloud ecosystems, including LLM gateway/Bedrock patterns, data residency, SSO/OIDC federation, and cost controls.
  
• Experience with Claude/Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot families, including MCP, connectors, skills, and trade-offs.
  
• Strong understanding of AI testing disciplines (accuracy, hallucination, bias, prompt evaluations) and AI governance/risk (DPIA, data classification, FCA considerations).
  
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, able to engage from board-level to engineer-level.
  
• Mentorship and capability-building mindset to strengthen the team and avoid key-person dependency.
  

Initial Areas of Focus & Benefits

• Sierra PoC – enhancing client NPS, helpdesk demand deflection, and colleague efficiencies.
  
• Claude Roll-out – boosting colleague productivity.
  
• AI Enablement – improving AI literacy and adoption across the business.
  
• AI Citizen Development Framework – accelerating solution time to market and reducing digital dependency.
  
• Copilot Continuous Improvement – driving ongoing colleague productivity gains.
  

If you are a visionary AI leader ready to shape the AI future and build sustainable, scalable AI capabilities, we want to hear from you.