Principal AI Platform Engineer

Principal AI Platform Engineer

UBDS Group delivers modern cloud, data and AI solutions across public and private sector organisations. We design and build scalable, secure and production ready platforms that solve real world problems and deliver measurable outcomes.

We're looking for a Principal AI Platform Engineer who combines deep AI architecture expertise with strong engineering capability and technical leadership. This is a senior hands on role for someone who can shape AI platforms and production AI solutions, guide delivery teams and help expand AI engineering as a core capability within UBDS.

The Role

As a Principal AI Platform Engineer at UBDS, you will lead the design and implementation of AI architectures across complex transformation programmes.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design and implementation of AI architectures
• Help clients move AI solutions from experimentation into secure production delivery for large scale user bases
• Define platform standards covering governance, observability, security, orchestration and operational support
• Support technical discovery, bids and client architecture discussions
• Work closely with delivery, account and capability teams to shape AI opportunities
• Mentor and upskill engineers moving into AI engineering delivery
• Build reusable engineering patterns, accelerators and reference architectures
• Support internal AI enablement and automation initiatives across UBDS

What We're Looking For Essential Experience

• Strong hands on engineering background with experience delivering secure AI platforms, AI enabled applications or machine learning solutions into production environments
• Deep understanding of modern AI architecture patterns and real world operational delivery, including MLOps/Evals
• Strong Python engineering capability and experience working across cloud native engineering environments
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into wider enterprise, cloud and data ecosystems
• Experience acting as a senior technical lead, principal engineer or design authority
• Comfortable working directly with senior client stakeholders
• Strong mentoring and coaching capability
• Experience with some of the following technologies or ecosystems:
  • Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker
  • Claude / Anthropic
  • Azure AI Foundry or Azure OpenAI
  • Databricks
  • Vector databases and RAG architectures
  • Agentic AI orchestration frameworks and MCP servers
  • Model and data lifecycle management

Desirable Experience

• Experience working within public sector or regulated environments
• Experience with secure government delivery environments
• Experience contributing to bids, pre sales or technical strategy
• Knowledge of responsible AI and AI governance frameworks
• Experience scaling engineering capability or building new technical practices

We do not expect candidates to have deep expertise across every technology listed above. We are looking for individuals with strong real world production AI delivery experience, architectural depth and the ability to adapt across evolving AI ecosystems.

Employee Benefits

• Training - All team members are offered a number of options in terms of personal development, whether it is technical led, business acumen or methodologies. We want you to grow with us and to help us achieve more
• Private medical cover for you and your spouse/partner, offered via Vitality
• Discretionary bonus based on a blend of personal and company performance
• Holiday - You will receive 25 Days holiday, plus 1 day for Birthday and 1 day for your work anniversary in addition to UK bank holidays
• Electric Vehicle leasing with salary sacrifice
• Contributed Pension Scheme
• Death in service cover

Equal Opportunities

We are an equal opportunities employer and do not discriminate on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, gender reassignment, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability or age.