Senior AI Engineer at IO Associates, Didcot, £Contract Rate

Senior AI Engineer (Contract)

Rate: £600-£650 per day (Outside IR35)
Location: Hybrid, South Oxfordshire (2 days onsite, 3 days remote)
Duration: Initial 6 month contract with extension potential

The Opportunity

A rapidly growing UK-based AI technology company is seeking a highly experienced Senior AI Engineer to join a team building cutting-edge AI systems used in high-stakes operational environments.

The organisation develops advanced decision-support platforms that combine large-scale multimodal data sources, agentic AI, and intelligent orchestration to help users make faster, better-informed decisions. Their solutions are deployed in environments where reliability, explainability, and performance are critical.

This role offers the opportunity to work on complex, production-grade AI systems rather than proofs of concept, taking ownership of architecture, implementation, deployment, and optimisation across the full development lifecycle.

The Role

As a Senior Applied AI Engineer, you will design, build, and deploy production-ready agentic AI systems that operate reliably in demanding environments.

You will take ownership of system architecture, multi-agent workflows, retrieval and reasoning pipelines, model integration, and deployment strategies. The emphasis is on engineering robust, scalable systems that deliver dependable outcomes in real-world use cases.

This is a senior, hands-on engineering role suited to someone who builds AI products from first principles rather than simply integrating existing tools.

Essential Skills & Experience

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Demonstrable experience building and deploying LLM-based or agentic AI systems in production environments.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Commercial experience with frameworks such as:
  • LangGraph
  • LangChain
  • Haystack
  • Similar agent orchestration technologies
• Experience designing scalable AI/ML architectures and production systems.
• Strong understanding of:
  • Retrieval and search architectures
  • Embeddings and vector databases
  • Tool/function calling
  • State management and memory
  • Model inference and optimisation
• Experience working with very large-scale multimodal datasets, including text, imagery, telemetry, and sensor data.
• Docker, Git, and cloud platform experience (AWS preferred).
• Experience deploying solutions into secure or regulated environments.
• Strong stakeholder communication and technical leadership capabilities.

Interested in hearing more? Please get in touch with Rebecca Long on 0117 332 8100 / r.long @ ioassociates.co.uk