Lead Applied AI Engineer

Manchester, UK (Hybrid) 

£80,000–£100,000 depending on experience + equity

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.

Our work runs from research and rapid prototypes through to production software, AI evaluation and cloud infrastructure at scale, for clients ranging from innovative startups and global organisations to policing and secure government. That means genuinely hard problems and real impact.

The role
This is a forward-deployed role for an experienced technical leader. You’ll lead an engineering squad, own the technical delivery of client projects, and work closely with customers to turn ambiguous AI opportunities into reliable production systems.

 What you’ll do

• Stay hands-on: write code while setting the standard for engineering quality and technical decision-making across the team.
• Work directly with clients to shape ambiguous problems, recommend the right solutions and bring them along on the journey.
• Own delivery end to end, from discovery and prototyping through to production, handover and ongoing improvement.
• Lead the design of production-grade AI systems, including LLM applications, RAG, AI agents, evaluation frameworks, model serving, cloud-native infrastructure and MLOps workflows.
• Make pragmatic trade-offs between speed, reliability, security, maintainability and commercial constraints.
• Run sprint planning, retros and code reviews so the team stays focused, unblocked and delivering.
• Mentor engineers and support their development, helping them grow their technical judgement and client-facing confidence.
• Help grow the team through hiring, and the business through technical input on proposals and sales.

Why join Fuzzy Labs?

• Work at the frontier of Applied AI: shape how fast-moving AI technologies are used in production, using open source where it fits.
• Real impact: solve meaningful problems for innovative companies, AI safety and security teams, policing and secure government.
• Space to explore: dedicated time for R&D, open-source work, blogs and videos, and the chance to build your own voice in the applied AI community.
• Grow with us: take on more technical, client and leadership responsibility as the company grows.

 The important details

• Equity: equity options, a genuine stake in Fuzzy Labs
• Office: modern central Manchester office with an on-site gym. We’re in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
• Travel: occasional visits to client sites across the UK
• Security clearance: you’ll need SC clearance after you start, which includes credit and criminal record checks, so we can only consider candidates with 5+ years’ UK residence
• Holiday: 25 days, rising to 30 with length of service
• Development: £500 annual budget, plus the AI assistant(s) of your choice
• Benefits: healthcare cash plan, enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption leave, Cycle to Work, volunteering time and company socials

Skills and experience

• Strong experience writing and deploying production-grade Python, such as serving ML models, building inference services or APIs, or shipping AI-powered applications.
• Hands-on experience with ML or generative AI systems, such as LLM applications, RAG, embeddings, agents, model evaluation or model serving.
• Experience designing and delivering cloud systems (AWS, Google Cloud or Azure) with modern DevOps and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience leading technical delivery across a project or team, including planning, managing technical risk and reviewing architecture.
• Experience managing or mentoring software engineers, ideally in an agile team.
• Fluency with Git, Linux, Docker and common open-source AI, ML or MLOps tools. A strong opinion on your editor of choice is welcome ;)
• Excellent communication skills, with clients and within the team.

Don’t tick every box? Apply anyway. Applied AI sits across software engineering, ML engineering, data science, DevOps and product delivery, so you don’t need “applied AI” in your job title. We care more about strong engineering foundations, leadership experience, what you know deeply and how quickly you learn.

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

At Fuzzy Labs, we believe diverse teams build better technology. We're committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone feels valued, respected and able to do their best work. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, and encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every requirement listed in the job description.

Interested?

If you’d like to work with us, please use the link below. Include a few words about yourself and what interests you about the role, plus 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!