AI Engineer (Java OR Python) - Sheffield (Hybrid) - Inside IR35

(To save both our time, please don''t apply if you don''t agree with the daily rate) Lead AI Platform Engineer Location: Sheffield (Hybrid) 2x - 3x days per week onsite Duration: 6 - 12 months rolling Budget: £300 - £400 per day (D.O.E) IR35: Inside IR35 We are looking for an experienced Lead AI Platform Engineer to take a hands-on technical leadership role within a large-scale Finance AI platform. Mandatory Experience 7+ years'' software engineering experience. Strong hands-on development experience with Java and/or Python. Experience building cloud-native applications on Azure, AWS or GCP. Strong knowledge of Kubernetes, Microservices, APIs, Event-Driven Architecture and DevOps. Hands-on experience with LLM integration, RAG and Agentic AI. Experience with AI frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen or CrewAI. Strong understanding of enterprise architecture, scalability, security and production engineering. Proven experience providing technical leadership, mentoring engineers and contributing hands-on to delivery. Desirable/Bonus Experience Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or similar platforms. Vector databases, knowledge retrieval and AI observability tooling. Banking, Financial Services or Treasury experience. Experience establishing AI engineering standards across multiple teams. ..... full job details .....