Senior Applied AI Engineer

About us

Fuzzy Labs is a fast growing, Applied AI engineering consultancy based in Manchester. We help organisations turn ambitious AI ideas into secure, reliable systems that work in the real world.

We work across the full AI engineering lifecycle, from research, discovery, experimentation and rapid prototypes through to production software, AI evaluation, cloud infrastructure and systems at scale. Our work spans innovative startups, global organisations, policing and secure government, giving our engineers the opportunity to solve genuinely difficult problems and see the impact of what they build.

We're growing, and we're building an engineering organisation for the next generation of AI. You'll work with modern AI technologies, strong software engineering practices and open-source tools, while having dedicated opportunities for R&D, learning and contributing back to the wider technical community.

We value strong engineering foundations, a drive to keep pace within a fast changing space, deep expertise, broad technical curiosity and a passion for continuous learning. You don't need experience with every technology we use - we're interested in what you know deeply, how you approach new problems, and how quickly you can learn.

Why join Fuzzy Labs?

• Work at the frontier of Applied AI: Build with rapidly evolving AI technologies and help determine how they should be used in production, leveraging Open Source solutions when needed and delivering AI with impact for our clients.
• Work that has real impact: Work directly with varied organisations solving meaningful problems, from innovative companies, AI security and AI safety to policing and secure government.
• Build and advise: Prototype, write production software, evaluate AI systems, deploy infrastructure and see solutions through into the real world. Advise and consult with customers on how to best leverage and utilise modern AI.
• Dedicated space to explore: Client delivery is complemented by R&D, experimentation, open-source work and the ability to publish technical content.
• Grow with the company: Take on greater technical, client and leadership responsibility as the Applied AI capability and engineering organisation grows.
• A sustainable working environment: Hybrid working, generous leave, enhanced family leave and flexibility support exceptional work without requiring people to sacrifice everything else.

The important details

• Salary - £65,000–£80,000 depending on experience
• Equity - Equity options - a genuine stake in Fuzzy Labs
• Office - Modern vibrant Central Manchester office with gym on site.
• Location - Manchester
• Working pattern - Manchester Hybrid - 3 days per week in the office
• UK residency - Five or more years' UK residence to ensure Security Clearance (SC) requirements are met.
• Holiday - 25 days, rising to 30 with each year of service
• Development - £500 annual development budget + AI assistant(s) of your choice
• Extras - Healthcare cash plan, enhanced family leave including maternity, paternity and adoption leave, Cycle to Work, volunteering time and company socials

Location

Manchester Hybrid (3 days a week on-site)

We work together from our central Manchester office on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, with Tuesday and Friday normally remote.

We believe regular time together helps us make decisions faster, learn from one another and build the strong working relationships needed for high-quality client delivery.

Some projects also involve occasional travel to customer sites across the UK.

Security clearance

‍Finally, due to the sensitive nature of some projects, you will be required to undergo UK government security clearance after you start (at SC level - see this link for more information). This will include a credit check and criminal records check. As a result, we’re only able to consider candidates who have been resident in the UK for 5 or more years.

The role

The ideal candidate will be motivated to grow and progress in line with the company’s ambitions: we’re looking for passionate engineers with an appetite for keeping up with the cutting edge, an eye for detail, and a knack for creative problem solving.

This role suits experienced engineers looking for a forward-deployed engineering role where they can combine strong software engineering, applied AI, technical leadership, and hands-on customer problem solving. You’ll work close to the people using what we build, helping turn ambiguous AI opportunities into reliable production systems.

As a Senior Applied AI Engineer, we’ll look to you to take ownership of complex technical workstreams, help shape the direction of projects, support other engineers, and work confidently with customers to understand their needs and deliver high-quality solutions.

A typical day

Our engineers collaborate closely with their team leads and the customer to design and implement high quality AI solutions. We encourage our senior engineers to work with a high degree of autonomy and own workstreams across every stage of the project delivery lifecycle, including:

• Working closely with clients to understand their needs, build strong relationships, and bring them along on the journey. This includes helping shape ambiguous problems, leading demos, participating in discovery workshops, visiting customer sites where useful, and supporting training sessions.
• Taking ownership of technical workstreams, from early discovery and prototyping through to the design, build and deployment of secure, reliable, production-grade AI systems.
• Designing and implementing features and full workstreams to a high standard of engineering, including good documentation, automated testing, observability, maintainable code and clear technical decision-making.
• Building with modern AI techniques and tooling, which may include LLM-powered applications, retrieval augmented generation, model serving, evaluation frameworks, AI agents, data pipelines, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Working with your team lead and other engineers to design systems, plan implementation, break down technical work, and manage delivery risks.
• Contributing to sprint planning, retrospectives and code reviews, while helping maintain high engineering standards across the team.
• Supporting and mentoring other engineers by sharing context, reviewing technical approaches, and helping the team make good engineering decisions.
• Ensuring our high engineering standards are maintained and our clients are delighted.
• Staying up-to-date with a fast-moving industry, embracing new tools and frameworks, and sharing our learnings with the team.

As well as client work, we also set aside time to work on R&D projects and produce content in the form of blogs and videos. These projects are how we keep on top of a fast-moving technology landscape, in addition to being our greatest source of marketing. You’ll have the opportunity to craft your own voice in the applied AI and MLOps community through R&D content.

Skills and Experience

Our team is made up of a mix of backgrounds. We are looking for smart, curious people who are always expanding their knowledge and exploring new and emerging technologies. If you get excited about keeping up with the newest AI tools, figuring out how to scale generative AI systems in the cloud, or turning prototypes into production software, then you’ll fit right in. Some of the skills and experience we look for include:

• An undergraduate degree in computer science, mathematics, or similar, or a relevant postgraduate degree.
• A passion for coding, machine learning, AI, open source technologies, and setting high standards for their implementation and adoption.
• Strong experience building production-grade software in Python. This could include training and serving machine learning models, building large-scale inference services, integrating data stores, building APIs, or deploying AI-powered applications.
• Experience with machine learning or generative AI systems, such as LLM-powered applications, RAG pipelines, embeddings, prompt engineering, model evaluation, agents, model serving, or ML workflows.
• Experience designing and delivering cloud-based systems, for example using AWS, Google Cloud or Azure, along with modern DevOps practices and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Experience making technical decisions across a project or workstream, including balancing delivery speed, reliability, security, maintainability and customer needs.
• Experience delivering software using an agile development methodology.
• Fluency in our core tooling: Git, Unix/Linux, Docker, and common open-source AI, ML or MLOps tools.
• You should be aware of the broad landscape of AI and machine learning applications, tools, and technologies and willing to deepen your knowledge.

We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all of the requirements. Applied AI is an emerging field, sitting at the intersection of software engineering, machine learning engineering, data science, DevOps and product delivery. We’re excited to speak to candidates from any of these backgrounds; you don’t need an explicit MLOps or applied AI job title already, as long as you have strong engineering foundations and are excited to immerse yourself in this fast-moving field.

Fuzzy Labs Values

We’ve built a great culture at Fuzzy Labs and how you work is as important as what you do, here’s some of the ways we see our values lived in this role:

• Loving what we do: You’ll love telling stories as a vehicle for generating tangible marketing results!
• Just trying it: Experimenting is in our nature, we aren’t afraid of trying something new or left field. Is there a new channel we should try? Don’t follow the norm, do something different in terms of tone and style.
• Being greater than the sum of parts: Marketing isn't a solo game, you’ll be part of a close knit team of technologists and commercial minds. Our team wants to contribute across the whole business and you should too. We’re in it together.
• Positive impact: We chose to build a business that will use AI for the benefit of society, you’ll be at the forefront of ensuring we find customers and use cases that cement and enhance this belief and deliver a positive impact in the world.

Interested?

If you’d like to work with us, please use the link below.

Please include a few words about yourself and what interests you about the role, and a link to your GitHub, Bitbucket or similar. If you’re on Kaggle, have a tech blog, a cool side-project, or an Instagram for your cat, dog, etc, send us that too!

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