Softwire on cord

Softwire

Lead AI Consultant

External position
London, UK
Remote in UK
Hiring internally for Softwire?
Consultancy
Softwire is at the forefront of bespoke digital engineering, working with some of the UK's leading brands.
Posted
6 months 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: Wave, Embedded, CI/CD
Other skills considered: Technical Direction, Automated Testing, User Testing

Logistics

Base salary: £65K - £90K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: On-site, Hybrid, Remote
Work from: Within United Kingdom
Working Timezones: (UTC) London +/- 2 hours
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Softwire is looking for a Lead AI Consultant to help our clients turn the current wave of AI capability (especially LLMs) into real, valuable, maintainable software.

This role is for a strong senior engineer / tech lead type who can bring AI into delivery teams in two ways:

  • Using AI tooling to improve engineering productivity across whole teams (e.g. coding assistants, test generation, code review support, documentation acceleration, internal dev workflows)
  • Building products and platforms that incorporate AI/LLM features, safely and pragmatically

While a detailed scientific understanding of ML and AI theory is helpful, the primary goal is delivery: shipping the right thing, safely, with modern engineering practices.

As a Lead AI Consultant, you’ll operate as a senior technical leader on client work, helping teams move from “AI curiosity” to working, production-grade solutions.

You will:

  • Work hands-on within multidisciplinary teams to design and deliver AI-enabled software
  • Help clients make the right calls on where AI adds value (and where it doesn’t)
  • Use, advise on, and develop AI-related features such as:
  • Intelligent search / retrieval experiences and RAG
  • Summarisation and document comprehension at scale
  • Context management
  • AI agents, MCP servers, and best-practice configuration of, for example, AGENTS.md
  • Advanced use of tools such as Claude Code and Codex
  • Assistants and copilots embedded into workflows
  • Classification, extraction, and decision support tooling
  • Retraining and fine-tuning models
  • Trade-offs between different models (including open models)
  • Calculation / forecasting of token usage
  • Vector databases
  • Well-formed opinions on and experience of AI-enhanced SDLCs
  • Set teams up for sustainable success through:
  • Strong engineering practices (testing, CI/CD, observability, quality)
  • Clear system boundaries and maintainable architecture
  • Safe and secure deployment patterns for AI components at scale
  • AI performance, accuracy, and reliability monitoring through evals
  • Coach and upskill client engineers on pragmatic, safe adoption of AI tools and techniques
  • Keeping yourself and your team up-to-date on the latest AI techniques and technology
  • Contribute to Softwire’s internal capability building: patterns, accelerators, reusable approaches, and a strong culture of “learning by building”

This is a role where engineering leadership matters not just experimenting with AI, but integrating it into systems responsibly, with teams who need to operate and extend it long after go-live.


Experience, qualifications & your approach:

You’re a strong senior software engineer / tech lead who can take ownership of technical delivery end-to-end, working hands-on while also guiding others. You bring credibility with both engineers and stakeholders, and you’re comfortable being the person who turns ambiguity into momentum.

Your experience and strengths include:

  • Senior engineering capability You have significant experience building and shipping production software, and you’re confident working across architecture, implementation, deployment, and operational support. You care about maintainability and long-term ownership as much as delivery speed.
  • Technical leadership and delivery ownership You can lead technical direction on a project: choosing appropriate patterns, establishing standards, helping teams make trade-offs, and ensuring work is built in a way that scales. You take responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks.
  • Practical experience applying AI in real teams You’re enthusiastic about bringing AI into development teams in ways that genuinely stick, including both:
  • AI tooling to support development (e.g. coding assistants, test generation, refactoring support, documentation acceleration, internal workflows)
  • Building products that incorporate AI/LLM features (e.g. assistants/coplots, summarisation, document understanding, semantic search/RAG, extraction, classification, decision support, workflow automation)
  • Strong engineering fundamentals You build with the discipline needed to keep software reliable and maintainable, including:
  • automated testing strategies (unit/integration/e2e where appropriate)
  • good CI/CD hygiene and code review practicesclean boundaries and readable, extensible code
  • observability and operational readiness (logging, monitoring, failure modes)
  • Confidence working with AI uncertainty and risk You understand that AI systems behave differently to deterministic software, and you build with that reality in mind — designing for predictable behaviour, graceful degradation, and appropriate safeguards. You’re able to explain limitations clearly and manage risk responsibly.

Your approach to the role:

You bring a strong balance of AI/engineering and client skills.

With clients you are great at bridging the gap between business needs and technical approaches. Your familiarity with the current AI landscape, focus on client needs and ability to innovate enables you to quickly establish yourself as a trusted advisor.

In your approach to technical delivery, you are pragmatic, product-minded, and outcomes-driven. You don’t treat AI as a novelty — you treat it as an engineering capability that should be applied carefully, with measurable value.

That means you:

  • Start with user and business outcomes, and can challenge whether AI is the right approach
  • Prefer simple, testable, production-ready solutions over fragile prototypes
  • Build AI-enabled features in a way that teams can confidently own and improve over time
  • Work iteratively: short feedback loops, real user testing, and continuous learning
  • Raise capability across teams by coaching, pairing, and sharing patterns

Company Benefits

  • Pension: Additional 5% of salary
  • 25 days annual leave (with the option to buy and sell)
  • Time off for company-wide morale activities, time off for charitable / CSR activities
  • Free annual eye test, income protection, cycle to work, electric vehicle lease schemes, and payroll charity donations.
Lead AI Consultant at Softwire
Position posted 6 months 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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