AI Principal

AND Digital

AI Principal responsible for influencing AI projects and coaching teams on AI best practices at AND Digital. Championing software quality and architectural solutions for clients.

Posted 5/11/2026full-timeManchester • 🇬🇧 United KingdomLeadWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Use expert technical knowledge to influence AI-driven projects
Coach clients and teams on best-in-class AI practices
Act as a persuasive realist for clients
Champion software quality and Human-Centred AI
Architect large-scale, production-ready AI implementations
Evangelise best practices to executives
Mentor engineers to turn AI hype into tangible business value

Requirements

What you’ll need

Deep Software Engineering Experience: Expert knowledge across the whole stack, with a proven ability to design and build scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems.
Architectural Vision: Comfortable shaping how we deliver engagements as the technical expert, bringing the best thinking to clients in terms of standards, templates, ways of working, and tools.
Hands-on Excellence: Comfortable being hands-on with development teams, understanding what great code looks like, and applying a DevOps mindset to ensure operational readiness.
Cloud & Infrastructure: Strong grounding in cloud-native patterns (AWS preferred), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and CI/CD pipelines.
Articulation: Act as a persuasive, but realist, evangelist for AI best practices, educating stakeholders, at any level, on the value impact.
Agentic Architectures: Design and oversee the delivery of autonomous, agent-based systems that utilise tools, APIs, and multi-step reasoning to solve complex business workflows.
Compound AI Systems: Shift beyond single-model interactions to architect complex systems that integrate multiple LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and deterministic logic guardrails.
Model Agnostic Strategy: Build "pluggable" technical architectures that allow for model interoperability, enabling the business to switch between providers without significant re-engineering.
LLMOps at Scale: Oversee the end-to-end lifecycle of AI products, from prompt versioning and vector database indexing to automated CI/CD pipelines.
Performance Optimization: Balance technical sophistication with commercial reality by implementing Small Language Models (SLMs) or edge-runtime solutions to optimize for latency and cost.
Evaluation & Reliability: Define and implement robust evaluation frameworks to measure model performance and accuracy (e.g., using "Golden Datasets" and automated benchmarking).
Safety & Ethics: Lead the technical strategy for bias mitigation, toxicity filtering, and hallucination management, ensuring all AI solutions are ethical and transparent.
Cost & Performance Engineering: Apply a pragmatic, commercial lens to technical design. Balance sophistication with reality by implementing Small Language Models (SLMs) or edge-runtime solutions to optimize for latency, cost, and efficiency.
Technical Advisory: Comfortable guiding clients through the AI landscape, advising on realistic opportunities and navigating the practical value of emerging patterns.
Mentorship: Proven experience mentoring the Developer community, sharing and receiving regular feedback to help engineers develop their AI and full-stack specialisms.
Act as a trusted technical partner to C-suite stakeholders, applying structured problem solving to guide AI decisions and resolve complex, ambiguous business challenges.
Lead agile teams to deliver high impact AI solutions, building repeatable tools and methodologies that ensure sustainable delivery and internal scalability across the business.
Identify the "value exchange" in client interactions to move beyond one off projects, proactively building strategic relationships that turn accounts into long term "raving fans."
Drive the external perception of the business as a premier AI authority by producing high-level content and speaking at events to promote deep technical expertise.

Benefits

Comp & perks

25 days holiday allowance + bank holidays (with flexible bank holidays)
Share scheme
A £1000 flexifund for gym membership, Cycle to Work, Health, dental and optical cash plans
Private medical insurance
6% employer pension contribution
For a full list of benefits - click here

ATS Keywords

✓ Tailor your resume

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools

AI-driven projectssoftware qualitycloud-native patternsInfrastructure as CodeCI/CD pipelinesautonomous systemsmodel interoperabilityLLMOpsperformance optimizationevaluation frameworks

Soft Skills

coachingpersuasionmentorshiparticulationtechnical advisorystructured problem solvingrelationship buildingevangelisminfluencingleadership