Senior AI Engineer

The role

You'll be the senior engineer on our high value and complex builds, embedded inside client teams from week one. You own the architecture for agentic systems, data pipelines and integrations, ship them to production, and raise the standards of the engineering team around you. Projects typically start as a plan, followed by a proof of concept, expand into a beta, and are then shipped to production. You'll be involved across the full arc.

Location: Remote (UK), with optional access to a number of London-based co-working spaces.

What you'll do

• Take a build end to end: architecture, implementation, deployment and handover.

• Design production AI systems, agents, retrieval, evaluation and the data plumbing underneath them.

• Work alongside client engineering teams, and directly with Nick and Mark, with no layer in between.

• Mentor and support our AI and graduate engineers, sharing what you know as the team grows.

What we look for

• Around 5+ years shipping production software, with real ownership of systems in the wild.

• Strong Python plus at least one typed language, and sound judgement on when to reach for which.

• Hands-on with LLMs and agents, plus cloud, data pipelines and good testing discipline.

• Comfortable client-facing, communicating clearly and understanding what clients need.

• An appetite for working in an inclusive team, alongside people whose backgrounds and lived experiences differ from your own.

Who we are

Fifty One Degrees is a UK AI and data consultancy, founded in 2023 by Nick and Mark who both built and sold their own companies. Prior to 51D, Nick Harding (CEO) founded and scaled the fintech Fluro to four million credit applications a year. Mark Somers (CPO) built 4most into the UK's largest independent credit risk consultancy.

We embed practitioners in client teams and build the best solution that will drive for maximum client value. Strategy, governance and training are also key, but we stay and build rather than hand over a document and leave.

We're a fast-growing startup and the client list is highly varied with clients across financial services, retail, property and PR (to name a few).

This role is for a client-facing consultant that works as a software engineer. Coding ability is non-negotiable, but you'll spend time in front of clients as well as in an editor.

A real part of what we do is AI enablement and strategy: helping client teams adopt AI tooling, redesigning how they work around it, and building the systems that make it stick. This means configuring and integrating as well as writing code from scratch. If you are looking for a role that's only heads-down engineering, this isn't it. If you want to see how AI actually lands inside a business and unlocks value, this is the role for you.

How we work

Small teams, real ownership, no layer of middle management between you and the client or the founders. You're trusted with real work from week one, combined with the right level of support. We pair, we share what we learn, and we're honest about what's working and what isn't.

Our process

Our typical hiring process usually consists of the following stages:

• Initial screening call

• Competency-based interview

• Technical assessment

Note that we may add additional assessment stages if required.

Additional note

A career break or a non-linear route into engineering isn't a blocker here. We hire on what you can do now, not the shape of your CV, and we offer structured ramp-up and mentoring for anyone returning after time out.

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