Principal AI Engineer

About the role

We're looking for a Principal AI Engineer to take end to end technical ownership of a large organisation's unified AI assistant platform, a conversational AI product that is evolving from supporting a handful of use cases today into the single, unified entry point for AI driven interactions across the business.

This is a hands on technical leadership role. You won't just advise, you'll own the architecture, set the standards and be the final word on the hard trade offs as the platform scales from its current state into a full multi-layer AI ecosystem spanning governance, data, models, orchestration and user experience.

You'll work closely with delivery teams, enterprise architecture and business stakeholders to balance a long term target state vision against the pragmatic delivery of near term priority use cases.

Key responsibilities

• Own the AI assistant as a technical product end to end accountable for its product direction and architecture, including its core "front door" definition and product concept.

• Own the target architecture, standards and key decisions across the control plane and runtime layer (registry, evals, observability, orchestration, inference, memory), the data and model foundation layer, and the governance and identity layer that wraps every agent, including line of business agents.

• Own the technical delivery roadmap, define and maintain a staged roadmap (stages & horizons) that sequences the platform's evolution, along with the architecture defined for each stage and own prioritisation of what gets built and in what order.

• Act as the single technical authority across the full stack (all architecture layers, front-end through to governance), providing full-lifecycle technical guidance to delivery teams.

• Own and maintain key architecture artefacts, including the product concept definition, the delivery roadmap, the target-state reference architecture, architecture standards, the governance and identity model, the architecture decision/trade-off log, and the broader architecture documentation set.

• Undertake other ad-hoc technical work directly related to the platform's architecture as required.

About you

• Proven experience as a Principal Engineer, Architect, or similar technical authority role on an enterprise scale AI or conversational AI platform.

• Deep, hands-on architecture experience across the full AI stack from data/model foundations through orchestration, inference and memory, up to governance and identity.

• A track record of owning technical roadmaps and translating long term vision into sequenced, deliverable stages.

• Strong stakeholder and delivery team leadership, comfortable being the final technical decision maker across multiple concurrent workstreams.

• Excellent documentation discipline, you can produce and maintain reference architecture, standards and decision logs that other teams can actually follow.

• Experience with enterprise governance frameworks for AI/agentic systems is highly regarded.