AI Engineering Lead

About Glue Reply:

Glue Reply is the outcome-focused Architecture specialist within the Reply Group. Through services encompassing Business Change/Transformation, Strategy & Architecture, Data exploitation and Integration, Glue Reply is able to help its clients succeed by turning strategy into tangible solutions and vision into practical outcomes. Glue Reply diagnoses the challenges and advises on the way to make real impact - enabling its clients to deliver. www.glue.reply.com

Role Overview:

We are recruiting for an AI Engineering Lead to set the technical direction for AI within Glue, owning the vision, standards and delivery of production-grade AI solutions for our clients. This is a hands-on leadership role, where you will architect, build & ship scalable AI systems whilst leading the establishment of our growing AI capability within Glue. You will shape modern agent-based and AI driven architectures and turn cutting edge ideas into real world impact. We're looking for someone with deep software & ML engineering expertise who wants to solve problems not just build solutions and play a defining role in how AI scales across our business and the business of our clients.

Responsibilties:

• Lead the design & implementation of advanced AI solutions, including LLMs, agentic systems, and retrieval-augmented pipelines.
• Design, deploy, & optimise scalable AI workloads on cloud platforms ensuring high availability, performance, & reliability.
• Define and enforce architectural standards, design patterns, and best practices for scalable AI engineering.
• Build and optimise MLOps pipelines, CI/CD workflows, and infrastructure-as-code for production ML systems.
• Ensure reliability, observability, monitoring, and performance optimisation across all deployed AI systems
• Drive applied research and experimentation to explore emerging AI architectures, techniques, and frameworks
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to the AI engineering team fostering technical growth and a culture of collaboration
• Identify and champion opportunities for AI adoption across the organisation
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and architectures to maintain technical leadership.

About the Candidate:

• Strong software engineering capability with 3+ years' hands-on development experience (Python preferred)
• Proven track record designing, building, testing, and deploying production-grade AI/ML services
• Hands-on LLM application development experience, including designing and shipping solutions using RAG and/or agentic patterns, LLM orchestration frameworks vector search and robust API integrations with internal and third-party systems.
• Proven track record of working with major cloud platforms, deploying and managing AI workloads in production environments.
• Solid understanding of DevOps/MLOps practices, including CI/CD, containerisation, and orchestration using tools such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience in leading and mentoring small-to-medium engineering teams, effectively balancing technical delivery with team development.
• Strong problem-solving and system design skills, with experience architecting scalable and distributed AI systems.
• A 'make it happen' attitude that is outcome focused and collaborative by nature.

Reply is an Equal Opportunities Employer and committed to embracing diversity in the workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type regardless of age, sexual orientation, gender, identity, pregnancy, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, disability, medical history, skin colour, marital status or parental status or any other characteristic protected by the Law.

Reply is committed to making sure that our selection methods are fair to everyone. To help you during the recruitment process, please let us know of any Reasonable Adjustments you may need.