Principal ML/AI Engineer

Job title: Principal ML/AI Engineer

About the Role

The Fitch Group Emerging Technology AI Center of Excellence (COE) is seeking a principal ML/AI engineer to build and support Generative AI, ML, DL, and data science solutions across the organization. The role is based in London or Manchester and offers high visibility on flagship Fitch products.

What You'll Do

• Work closely as part of product squads to build, integrate, and deploy GenAI, multi-AI-Agents and data science solutions.
• Ensure sharing best practices and learnings with other squad members.
• Design and spearhead the development of Gen AI, AI Agents and MLOps platforms, applications, and solutions driven by GenAI, deep learning and ML to address business challenges and elevate product performance.
• Build standards and recommendations for the AI engineering tech stack and data science models used across different enterprise AI use cases.
• Work closely with AI implementation, governance, and enterprise architecture squads to apply the appropriate standards.
• Keep abreast of the latest vendors across different areas of emerging technologies and actively participate in vendor evaluations and tool assessments for relevant use cases; onboard the right solutions into the platform.
• Effectively communicate advanced data science/ML concepts in simple language to business stakeholders, always focusing on applicability to Fitch.
• Develop and deploy machine learning and GenAI solutions to meet enterprise goals and support experimentation and innovation.
• Collaborate with data scientists to identify innovative machine learning and GenAI solutions that leverage data to meet business goals.
• Designs and develops scalable GenAI and ML workflows that leverage machine learning, gen AI and deep learning models to meet enterprise requirements.
• Actively participate in maintaining SLAs for Production applications and support.
• Create metrics to continuously evaluate the performance of machine learning solutions and improve the performance of existing machine learning solutions.
• Build with AWS and Azure cloud computing services providing the necessary infrastructure, resources, and interfaces to enable data loading and LLM workflows.
• Use Python/Java and large-scale data workflow orchestration platforms like Airflow to construct software artifacts for ETL, interfacing with diverse data formats and storage technologies, and incorporate them into robust data workflows and dynamic systems.

What We're Looking For

• Work experience as a ML or AI engineer (5+ years).
• Prior experience developing production quality Python is essential.
• Deep understanding of Agentic AI systems and multi-agent architectures.
• Proficiency in machine learning and deep learning algorithms such as deep learning, NLP, neural networks, multi-class classifications, decision trees, SVM.
• Strong adherence to software and ML development fundamentals (code quality, automated testing, source version control, optimization).
• Prior experience building Gen AI frameworks and leveraging and/or finetuning LLMs.
• Experience building/enhancing search and information retrieval systems.
• Exposure/experience in containerization technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, AWS EKS etc.
• Knowledge of popular cloud computing vendor infrastructure & services (AWS and Azure), e.g., AWS Bedrock, S3, SageMaker, Azure AI Search, Azure OpenAI, Azure blob storage.
• Master’s degree or above in ML/DS, CS, applied mathematics or other research-based field.

Nice to Have

• Passionate about the power of data and predictive analytics to drive better business outcomes for customers.
• Proven ability to work effectively in a distributed working environment and in a fast-paced environment.
• Familiarity with credit ratings agencies, regulations, and data products globally.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills.
• Champion of good code quality and architectural practices.
• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to work proactively and as a team player.

Compensation & Benefits

• High impact role with significant visibility and opportunities to work on flagship Fitch products.
• Fitch promotes a strong work culture and work-life balance.
• Location: London or Manchester, United Kingdom.