Senior AI/ML Specialist

Senior AI Engineer | Belfast (Remote-First) | AI Centre of Excellence At a Glance Sits within a dedicated AI Centre of Excellence Stack: Azure, Python, React, Terraform Northern Ireland - Remote working About the Company A large, well-established global technology company with a dedicated AI Centre of Excellence - a team set apart from its core consulting and digital services divisions, focused purely on applied research and product builds using the latest Microsoft AI technology. Role Overview You'll join a close-knit team of around 10-11 engineers (the majority in Belfast, with others in Poland, Birmingham, and London) as a Senior AI Engineer, providing technical leadership on AI-powered products and applied research work. The team is genuinely AI-first: they're looking for strong, well-rounded engineers rather than candidates who tick every box, whether your background is more AI-shaped or more software-shaped. Key Responsibilities Provide technical leadership and own architecture, planning, and delivery for AI-powered products and applied research projects Build and integrate AI/ML solutions - model integration, evaluation, prompt engineering, and RAG pipelines - using Azure AI services (Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Foundry, Cognitive Services) Design and develop across the full stack, from API design and data pipelines through to front-end integration Coach, mentor, and support the development of junior engineers within the team Drive modern CI/CD practice, including model versioning, experiment tracking, and automated evaluation for ML/AI workloads What You'll Need Essential: Strong hands-on experience in Python or C#/.NET, with real experience building AI/ML-powered products (model integration, evaluation, prompt engineering, or RAG) Technical experience - owning architecture, planning, and delivery for a product or project, with a track record of coaching and developing junior engineers Experience with Microsoft Azure AI services (Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Foundry, Cognitive Services) or an equivalent cloud AI platform Desirable: Familiarity with the Microsoft agent ecosystem - Microsoft Agent Framework, Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365 Agents SDK, or Semantic Kernel Understanding of responsible AI practice - content filtering, PII handling, bias testing, governance of autonomous agent actions Experience with vector databases or search indices, and broader public cloud platforms (Azure or AWS) Benefits & Package £50k-£80k DOE, plus a 5% performance/risk element Fully remote-first NI Wide - no mandatory office days, with an optional Wednesday in-office and roughly monthly full-team get-togethers Straightforward two-stage interview process - culture and skills, then a technical deep dive - no take-home assessment Get in touch with Colin directly at Skills: AI Engineer Azure Python React