Senior AI Engineer at Wave Works, United Kingdom, £600-£900 per day

Senior AI Engineer (Contract) £600 – £900 per day (Outside IR35) + Extension Likely Fully Remote (UK)

6 Month Contract

About the Role

We're hiring a hands-on Senior AI Engineer to embed with a core engineering team building production agent systems for enterprise customers across Europe. You'll partner directly with the founders and senior engineers to build, deploy, and harden the agents already running in production. As one of the senior technical voices in the room, you'll own the AI layer end-to-end.

What You'll Do

You'll be deep in the code, opinionated about agent design, and comfortable owning the AI layer from architecture through to production. You'll work directly with engineers, product, and leadership to:

• Design and ship production AI agents using LangChain, LangGraph, or similar frameworks
• Build and optimise RAG pipelines, vector retrieval, and evaluation infrastructure
• Integrate LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source models) into customer-facing products
• Architect tool calling, memory, guardrails, and escalation logic for autonomous agents
• Partner with product and engineering to ship in tight, fast-moving cycles

Requirements

• 5+ years in software engineering with at least 2 years deep in production AI/ML systems
• Production experience building AI agents or conversational AI (not RAG demos or API wrappers)
• Strong Python and backend fundamentals (FastAPI, Postgres, Redis or similar)
• Hands-on with LangChain or LangGraph, RAG pipelines, and vector databases (Pinecone, Qdrant, pgvector)
• Background shipping inside startup or product company environments (no consultancy profiles)
• Comfortable explaining technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders

Day Rate & Engagement

• Competitive day rate: £600 – £900
• Outside IR35
• Initial 6 month contract with extensions standard for strong performers

Location

This role is fully remote within the UK. You will need to be UK-based and hold the right to work in the UK. Occasional travel for team offsites or planning sessions may be required but the day-to-day is remote.

Before You Apply

This is a hands-on senior contract seat and the right person will have lived this before. Please only apply if you meet all of the following:

• You have shipped production AI agents or LLM systems to real external customers
• You have worked in startup or scaleup environments and are comfortable operating in ambiguity
• You are available for an initial 6 month commitment with strong likelihood of extension
• You hold the right to work in the UK
• You are comfortable being the senior AI technical voice in the room and self-managing in a remote setup

If this is a perfect match to your experience then please do not hesitate to apply or email me your CV directly at george.williams@wavetalent.co