Senior Applied AI Engineer

Senior Applied AI Engineer Contract Outside IR35 £700 - £900 per day DOE 6 months + likely extension Oxfordshire (hybrid - 2 days p/w on site) Our client is a rapidly scaling UK deep-tech company delivering advanced agentic AI capability. This role sits in their AI team, working with a commercial customer in biotech and pharma. They are hiring a Senior Applied AI Engineer to take ownership of the agentic AI systems underpinning their platform, on a contract basis, with genuine influence over how those systems are architected and delivered. This role suits an engineer who designs and ships systems rather than assembling pre-built components, someone who cares more about how a system performs once it's live and under pressure than how impressive it looks in a demo. What You'll Be Doing Architecting and building multi-agent AI systems end-to-end, combining frameworks such as LangGraph or Haystack where they add value with bespoke orchestration, state management and tool-calling logic where a framework won't cut it Writing production-grade code with reliability, latency and graceful failure handling designed in from the start rather than bolted on afterwards Embedding LLMs and vision-language models into live reasoning, search, summarisation and task-execution workflows, backed by solid retrieval, memory and guardrail design Deploying across cloud and on-premises environments, adapting your approach to each e...