Lead Consultant/Expert - AI Engineer

Lead Consultant/Expert - AI Engineer

The Software Engineer – Expert or Lead Consultant is a hands-on senior individual contributor who architects, builds, and operates complex digital products across AI, agentic systems, semantic technologies, data engineering, and cloud platforms. The role provides cross-product technical leadership, guides engineering teams, resolves critical technical challenges, and owns production performance and measurable product outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as a recognised expert across business domains and technology stacks, sharing standards and reusable practices across the organisation.

• Align cross-product technical strategy with product managers, architects, engineering peers, and key stakeholders.

• Shape product architecture and design, balancing scalability, security, resilience, performance, operability, cost, and delivery speed.

• Lead discovery, scoping, inception, and iteration planning, translating product outcomes into system designs, technical backlogs, and delivery plans.

• Direct complex, business-critical engineering initiatives spanning teams, products, sites, or platforms.

• Remain hands-on by building critical components, validating designs, reviewing code, and resolving complex technical issues.

• Architect AI-enabled and data-intensive products, including agentic AI, LLM services, semantic technologies, knowledge graphs, and data pipelines.

• Establish CI/CD, automated quality gates, secure engineering practices, and reliable release automation.

• Own production readiness and operational excellence across reliability, observability, security, performance, incident response, and product KPIs.

• Act as the team’s technical anchor, guiding technology choices, resolving conflicts, and addressing cross-team risks and dependencies.

• Coach engineers in paired programming, test-driven development, secure coding, and knowledge sharing across the engineering community.

• Required Skills & Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including technical leadership of complex, production-grade products or platforms.

• Expertise in software architecture, distributed and cloud-native system design, hands-on development, automated testing, CI/CD, security, observability, and production operations.

• Strong programming capability in Python and at least one additional modern language, with the ability to guide implementation and resolve complex issues at code level.

• Proven experience architecting and delivering LLM-based and agentic AI systems, including model and agent evaluation, MLOps/LLMOps, AI observability, and responsible AI controls.

• Strong knowledge of semantic technologies, including RDF, OWL, enterprise ontologies, knowledge graphs, SPARQL, semantic alignment, and ontology mapping.

• Experience with data engineering and analytics patterns, including ETL/ELT, lakehouse architecture, dimensional modelling, metadata-driven pipelines, and enterprise data models.

• Experience delivering AI and data solutions on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Fabric, or comparable enterprise cloud platforms.

• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture decisions across teams and products, mentor experienced engineers, establish standards, and influence product, engineering, data, security, and business stakeholders.

• Experience owning production outcomes and using reliability, customer, and business KPIs to drive technical priorities and continuous improvement.

• Preferred Skills

• Experience shaping enterprise architecture, platform strategy, engineering governance, or cross-product technology roadmaps.

• Experience with enterprise data catalogues, canonical models, or AI-assisted analytics and natural-language-query solutions.

• Relevant cloud, data, architecture, or AI certifications.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field is preferred. An equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience may be considered.

Experience

• 10 or more years of experience (Preferred)

• Supervisory Responsibilities

• This job does not have supervisory duties

• Education & Experience (in lieu)

• In lieu of the above education requirements, an equivalent combination of education and experience may be considered

• Primary Skills

• Software Development

• Shift Time