Motorway on cord

Motorway

Lead Generative AI Engineer

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for Motorway?
Automotive · Logistics · Marketplace
The UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace.
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
a week ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: AI Engineer
Experience level: Lead
Core skills considered: Artificial Intelligence, Python, SQL, AWS
Other skills considered: GCP, Data Pipelines, Cloud Computing

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 3 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We're looking for a Lead GenAI Engineer to set the technical standard for AI work across the function, and to build the hardest parts of it themselves.

You'll own the architecture and standards for complex, product-facing GenAI work. You'll hold sign-off on the systems that carry real risk, and you'll be the person a squad comes to when they've hit something genuinely hard. This is a player-coach role: your own code sets the bar others refer back to, and you'll spend as much energy making senior engineers better as you do building.

Most of what makes a GenAI feature good sits around the model rather than in it. The prompting is rarely the hard part. Retrieval quality is, and so is the data feeding it, evaluation you can trust, sensible behaviour when things fail, and getting it live and keeping it there. The standards that matter most here are the ones that make that work repeatable across teams. We're not precious about the route you took to this kind of engineering.

You'll report to the Engineering Manager for GenAI Engineering, partnering closely with the Principal GenAI Engineer, the Director of Data and AI, and product leadership.


In this role, you will:

  • Set the architecture standard for complex GenAI work across the function, not by mandate but by building things others learn from and want to adopt.
  • Hold sign-off on materially complex AI systems, catching architectural, safety and reliability problems before they reach production.
  • Own the shared foundations that determine feature quality across teams: retrieval patterns, evaluation infrastructure, data pipelines, and the tooling that makes good practice the easy path.
  • Build the hardest pieces of work directly, acting as the technical escalation point for the function's toughest problems.
  • Design for systems that stay up and stay affordable, covering graceful degradation, fallback behaviour, and cost and latency at production scale.
  • Develop the senior engineers around you by handing them harder problems, room to own decisions, and honest feedback.
  • Shape how we hire and review, bringing a clear and defensible view of what good looks like.
  • Bring specific, actionable industry insight into planning, explaining what a development means for our architecture rather than noting that the field moves fast.

About you

  • You've set technical direction that other engineering teams actually adopted, and you can talk about where that worked and where it didn't.
  • Strong Python, and SQL you genuinely use. A lot of this work is data work: grounding data, golden datasets, and understanding why something failed.
  • Deep, current expertise across the GenAI stack, including retrieval at scale, vector stores, agentic orchestration, multimodal work, evaluation infrastructure and fine-tuning where it earns its place.
  • You're fluent in the layer underneath: MLOps tooling, deployment and cloud infrastructure (we run on AWS and GCP), and you can tell the difference between a choice that matters and one that doesn't.
  • You design systems that survive contact with production, and you've been on the hook when they didn't.
  • A strong point of view on evaluation, including the difference between evals that catch regressions and evals that provide comfort.
  • Your direct contributions set a quality bar for the people around you.
  • You explain hard technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders without either condescending or losing the substance.
  • Self-awareness about where your knowledge runs out, and the instinct to bring in expertise early.

You could be a great fit if

  • You build with taste, preferring simple systems that work over clever ones that nearly do.
  • You use authority sparingly. You're not a blocker, but you'll stop a bad decision from shipping.
  • You get satisfaction from the unglamorous work that makes AI features actually good, not just the part that demos well.
  • You enjoy making other engineers better as much as building things yourself.
  • You've levelled people up in a way they'd recognise, whether through a talk, a review, or how you work day to day.
  • You hold a two-to-three-year view without losing touch with what's shipping this month.

Company Benefits

  • A competitive salary
  • Significant stock options — we succeed and fail together as a team — we want you to be included in our success
  • £500 annual learning budget with access to General Assembly courses, an Audible subscription and hundreds of books and online lessons
  • BUPA health insurance
  • Pension scheme
  • Motorway car leasing scheme — lease a zero-emissions electric vehicle at a significant discount
  • Enhanced maternity/paternity leave
  • Flexible working (approximately 2-3 days in the office a week) with the option to work fully remote for a month per year
  • Top spec M1 MacBook Pro and accessories
  • Regular social events
  • Cycle to work scheme
  • The chance to join a rapidly growing, revenue-generating startup and build products that will change an industry
  • The chance to work with the latest and greatest technologies, free from legacy systems and red tape
  • If you’re into cars, opportunities to work with vehicle data and learn about the automotive industry. We also have some fun, car-related activities (as well as non-car fun too!)
Lead Generative AI Engineer at Motorway
Position posted a week ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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