Lead AI DevOps Engineer
Summary
Lead AI DevOps Engineer providing technical leadership for embedding AI into production-grade, API-first platforms: setting architecture direction, modernizing legacy apps into microservices, and guiding cross-functional delivery. Core stack includes TypeScript, Python, CI/CD, and DevOps practices. Based in London.
In this role you lead the technical direction for embedding AI into production-grade, API-first software platforms. You will guide cross-functional teams through architectural decisions and delivery, balancing innovation with pragmatism to ensure secure, operable systems. You’ll modernize legacy apps toward service-based architectures and shape integration patterns between AI services and platforms. This position offers real impact by aligning AI capabilities with reliable, scalable software delivery.
Responsibilities- Provide technical leadership across AI-enabled software and DevOps engineering teams
- Set architectural direction for API-first design, system integration, and platform enablement for AI
- Lead modernization of legacy or existing applications toward service-based, API-driven architectures
- Define and guide integration patterns between applications, platforms, and AI services
- Decide on when/how emerging AI integration approaches (e.g., MCP) should be adopted
- Collaborate with architects, product teams, data scientists, and platform engineers to deliver end-to-end solutions
- Ensure solutions meet security, resilience, performance, and operability standards
- Anticipate and manage architectural and operational risks of AI-enabled systems
- Champion strong engineering practices across software development, DevOps, and platform engineering
- Lead by example in production-critical environments
- Delivery-focused leadership rather than experimentation for its own sake
- Senior or Lead Software Engineer, Lead DevOps Engineer, or similar hands-on leadership role
- Excellent software engineering fundamentals: system design, clean code, testing, long-term maintainability
- Deep experience designing and delivering API-driven and microservice-based systems
- Proven ability to modernise or integrate legacy systems into modern platforms
- Solid development experience in TypeScript and Python
- Experience spanning software delivery, CI/CD, infrastructure, and operations
- Comfortable setting direction and influencing teams without formal authority
- Ability to balance innovation with pragmatism in production environments
- strong technical credibility
- leadership without formal authority
- cross-functional collaboration
- API-driven design
- microservices
- TypeScript