I wanted to reach out as I’m supporting a global engineering and technology consultancy on a senior AI hire in London.
Although the title is Principal AI Engineer, the role is probably better described as a Founding AI Solutions Engineer or Forward Deployed AI Engineer style position.

They are looking for someone who can sit between hands on AI engineering, solution architecture, and client facing consulting.

The context is interesting. The business is seeing strong demand from enterprise clients around AI engineering, GenAI, automation, and production AI use cases. They now need a senior AI hire in the UK who can help bring this capability together.
The role would involve building AI solution accelerators, shaping client demos, running technical workshops, and delivering production grade AI systems across areas like LLMs, RAG, vector databases, classical ML, MLOps, cloud deployment, and data pipelines.

It is not a pure pre sales role, and it is not a strategy only consulting role. They need someone who can still build, but also explain technical choices clearly to customers and senior stakeholders.

The split is roughly 60 percent hands on engineering and 40 percent client facing solutioning.

They are looking for someone with:
• Strong AI, ML, or GenAI engineering experience
• Python and production engineering depth
• Experience taking AI systems into live environments
• Exposure to LLMs, RAG, vector databases, MLOps, or cloud AI delivery
• Confidence running demos, workshops, or customer facing technical conversations
• Consulting, FDE, solutions engineering, or enterprise delivery experience