AI Engineer at IO Associates, Manchester, £500-£550 per day

Contract AI Engineer

Location: Manchester city centre
On-site: 3 days per week
Rate: £550 per day outside IR35
Contract: Initial 6 months with strong extension potential

Overview
We are hiring a contract AI Engineer to build and deploy production-grade AI systems. This is a delivery role. You will take models from idea to live environment and make them work at scale.

This is not research or experimentation. The focus is shipping reliable AI into real products.

What you will do

• Build fine-tune and deploy ML and LLM-based solutions

• Work hands-on with Hugging Face models and tooling

• Design and implement RAG pipelines using LangChain or similar frameworks

• Build agent-based workflows where appropriate

• Integrate AI services into existing Back End and product platforms

• Own model performance latency and cost trade-offs in production

• Work closely with engineers and product teams on-site

What we are looking for

• Strong commercial experience as an AI Engineer or ML Engineer

• Advanced Python skills with production-quality code

• Hands-on experience with the Hugging Face ecosystem

• Practical experience with LangChain or other LLM orchestration frameworks

• Solid understanding of vector databases embeddings and retrieval strategies

• Experience deploying models via APIs containers or cloud services

• Able and willing to work from the Manchester office 3 days per week

Nice to have

• Experience with Azure or AWS ML tooling

• Experience with MLOps CI/CD and model monitoring

• Experience building AI features into customer-facing products

Why this role

• £550 per day outside IR35

• Real production AI work not demos

• Strong technical ownership

• Clear extension potential