Data Engineer

Job Description

Job Description: Principal AI Engineer Contract Duration: 6 Months (with view to extend) Inside IR35 Location: Central London Hybrid (3 days onsite / 2 days remote) Client Sector: Global Technology Consultancy / Enterprise Commercial Delivery A global technology consultancy is seeking a Principal AI Data Engineer to spearhead the design, architecture, and production delivery of advanced Generative and Agentic AI solutions for a major enterprise client. In this role, you will bridge the gap between rapid frontier AI experimentation and robust, large-scale enterprise data engineering. Working closely with commercial stakeholders, cross-functional squads, and technical leadership, you will translate high-value operational use cases into reliable, production-grade AI pipelines, intelligent agentic workflows, and governed data platforms. Key Responsibilities Agentic AI & Prototype Delivery: Architect, build, and deploy multi-agent workflows and task-driven AI systems using frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, or AutoGen, turning early proof-of-concepts into resilient production applications. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Design and tune enterprise-grade RAG pipelines, including chunking strategy, dense/hybrid retrieval, reranking, and semantic search. Data Platform Engineering: Build scalable, streaming, and batch data processing pipelines across modern cloud lakehouse architectures (Delta Lake, streaming architectures, and unified governance layers). Systematic Evaluation & Benchmarking: Establish continuous model evaluation, reproducibility checks, tracing, and benchmarking frameworks (MLflow, LLM-as-a-judge, golden test suites) to ensure performance, safety, and auditability. Architecture & Backlog Leadership: Set technical standards, define architectural blueprints, shape the product backlog, and lead agile delivery squads while communicating technical trade-offs to commercial business stakeholders. Production MLOps & Governance: Implement modern software engineering and CI/CD practices (OOP in Python, Pydantic, containerisation, automated testing, and cloud gateway governance). Key Technical Stack & Experience Experience: 8-12+ years of hands-on experience in data engineering, data science, or production ML/AI environments. Agentic Frameworks: Proven delivery with LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, smolagents, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations. Lakehouse & Data Engineering: Strong background with enterprise Databricks environments (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Delta Live Tables/DLT, Spark Structured Streaming, or Autoloader). Cloud & Model Ecosystem: Broad exposure to Azure cloud environments (Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI) or Databricks Mosaic AI ecosystem. Code Craftsmanship: Advanced Python (modular OOP, Pydantic, design patterns) and strong SQL capabilities. Education: Degree or advanced degree (BSc / MSc) in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Engineering, Econometrics, or related quantitative discipline. £500.00 - £600.00 / day Talent International UK and it's subsidiaries, Digital Gurus, Infinite Talent and Rethink act as an employment agency for permanent recruitment and employment business for the supply of temporary workers. By applying for this opportunity, you accept the T&C's, Privacy Policy and Disclaimers which can be found at talentinternational.co.uk TPBN1_UKTJ