AI Principal

AI Principal

Who We Are

We’re on a mission to close the world’s tech skills gap. 

We help organisations navigate the future of technology, combining human expertise, emerging tech and AI to deliver better outcomes, faster.

Since 2014, we’ve worked side-by-side with clients to solve complex challenges, build high-performing teams, and create lasting capability. As technology continues to evolve, we believe the most successful organisations will be those that combine the best of both: human ingenuity AND intelligent technology.

That belief is embedded in everything we do. We call it the genius of the AND: deep expertise AND practical delivery, innovation AND responsibility, ambitious work AND sustainable careers.

Through our Guide, Build and Equip approach, we help organisations embrace change, deliver meaningful impact, and develop the skills they need to thrive in an increasingly agentic world.

About you:

• You care deeply about producing high-quality work that delivers real value
• You’re comfortable navigating ambiguity and solving complex problems collaboratively
• You bring strong expertise in your craft, alongside a willingness to keep learning
• You communicate clearly and build trust quickly with clients and teammates
• You’re pragmatic, adaptable and outcome-focused
• You enjoy sharing knowledge and helping others grow
• You value low-ego collaboration and enjoy working as part of multidisciplinary teams

The Role

The AI Principal will use their expert technical knowledge to influence the direction of AI-driven projects, whilst coaching clients and teams alike on how to adopt best-in-class AI practices to build and deliver remarkable products. 

You will step into a role where you won't just build systems; you will act as a persuasive realist for our clients. You will champion software quality, Human-Centred AI, and the necessary guardrails required for enterprise adoption. Whether you are architecting large-scale, production-ready AI implementations, evangelising best practices to executives, or mentoring engineers, you will be the driving force behind turning AI hype into tangible business value.

What you’ll bring to the table:

Core Technical Leadership

• Deep Software Engineering Experience: Expert knowledge across the whole stack, with a proven ability to design and build scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems.A good understanding of data strategies would also be valuable. 
• Architectural Vision: Comfortable shaping how we deliver engagements as the technical expert, bringing the best thinking to clients in terms of standards, templates, ways of working, and tools.
• Hands-on Excellence: Comfortable being hands-on with development teams, understanding what great code looks like, and applying a DevOps mindset to ensure operational readiness.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Strong grounding in cloud-native patterns (AWS preferred), Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), and CI/CD pipelines.
• Articulation: Act as a persuasive, but realist, evangelist for AI best practices, educating stakeholders, at any level, on the value impact.

Systemic AI Design

• Agentic Architectures: Design and oversee the delivery of autonomous, agent-based systems that utilise tools, APIs, and multi-step reasoning to solve complex business workflows.
• Compound AI Systems: Shift beyond single-model interactions to architect complex systems that integrate multiple LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and deterministic logic guardrails.
• Model Agnostic Strategy: Build "pluggable" technical architectures that allow for model interoperability, enabling the business to switch between providers without significant re-engineering.
• LLMOps at Scale: Oversee the end-to-end lifecycle of AI products, from prompt versioning and vector database indexing to automated CI/CD pipelines.
• Performance Optimization: Balance technical sophistication with commercial reality by implementing Small Language Models (SLMs) or edge-runtime solutions to optimize for latency and cost.

AI Strategy & Governance

• Evaluation & Reliability: Define and implement robust evaluation frameworks to measure model performance and accuracy (e.g., using "Golden Datasets" and automated benchmarking).
• Safety & Ethics: Lead the technical strategy for bias mitigation, toxicity filtering, and hallucination management, ensuring all AI solutions are ethical and transparent.
• Cost & Performance Engineering: Apply a pragmatic, commercial lens to technical design. Balance sophistication with reality by implementing Small Language Models (SLMs) or edge-runtime solutions to optimize for latency, cost, and efficiency.
• Technical Advisory: Comfortable guiding clients through the AI landscape, advising on realistic opportunities and navigating the practical value of emerging patterns.
• Mentorship: Proven experience mentoring the Developer community, sharing and receiving regular feedback to help engineers develop their AI and full-stack specialisms.

Consulting & Client Delivery:

• Act as a trusted technical partner to C-suite stakeholders, applying structured problem solving to guide AI decisions and resolve complex, ambiguous business challenges.
• Lead agile teams to deliver high impact AI solutions, building repeatable tools and methodologies that ensure sustainable delivery and internal scalability across the business.
• Identify the "value exchange" in client interactions to move beyond one off projects, proactively building strategic relationships that turn accounts into long term "raving fans."
• Drive the external perception of the business as a premier AI authority by producing high-level content and speaking at events to promote deep technical expertise.

Why join AND Digital?

We’re building a culture where talented people can do meaningful work, continue growing, AND enjoy the journey along the way.

Our model is designed to build belonging and connection: we’re organised into regional ‘Clubs’ of no more than 80 people, so you (and our clients) get the benefits of that small company feel while also being connected to a larger whole.

Our Practice Areas act as a ‘second home’ for our ANDis - a place where you can innovate and learn with like-minded experts who care deeply about their craft, support each other generously, and believe the best ideas come from collaboration, not hierarchy.

Our culture is rooted in our values of Wonder, Share and Delight, and shows up through five traits that we celebrate and nurture in all our ANDis: we value curiosity, ambition and a growth-mindset. We are deeply client-centric. Most important of all we are human - we create an inclusive environment where people feel trusted, supported and able to be themselves.

By joining AND, we’ll provide:

• 25 days bookable holiday + flexible Bank Holidays 
• Pension: 6% of salary paid by AND Digital with a further 2% paid by you (can be increased by choice).
• Aviva healthcare cover (including pre-existing condition cover) for you.
• Flexibenefit: £1000 assigned to you via our benefits portal to select or upgrade the benefits that suit you the most. Any unused allowance from the £1000 can be taken as cash. 
• Life Assurance.
• Income Protection.
• Eye test + first pair of glasses.
• Parental Benefits: Generous Enhanced Maternity and Enhanced Partner (Paternity) Leave.

Equal Opportunities Statement

Diversity and inclusion are hugely important to us, and we’re committed to providing equal opportunities for all. We’re actively recruiting for a diverse and inclusive workforce so want to ensure we do everything we can to support your application.

We want you to feel safe and empowered to let us know if you need any adjustments to be made to your application or interview process, so please speak to our recruitment team.