Senior Tech Lead, Enterprise AI Products (Contract)

Senior Tech Lead, Enterprise AI Products (Contract) West London, 3 days per week on site, up to £800/day, Inside IR35 THE COMPANY A major international aviation group is building a brand-new AI engineering capability to transform its maintenance and supply chain operations. The programme is fully greenfield: the team formed only weeks ago, there is a roadmap of 7 internal AI products, and the first is an LLM-powered contract intelligence platform targeting tens of millions of pounds in savings across the group. THE ROLE This is a deeply technical leadership role. You will own architecture across half the domain, drive the technical decisions, and work with squads in London and Barcelona to deliver against them. It is not a programme, delivery or governance position: you make the architectural calls rather than facilitate them. You will: • Design large-scale agentic AI architectures: LLM document processing, structured extraction, RAG, invoice-to-contract matching • Own low-level design decisions, including API design, data models and service boundaries • Set and drive technical processes: engineering standards, security practices, including pen testing, SDLC ownership • Work across the full stack, from front end through back end to ML/AI and data • Whiteboard solutions directly with senior business stakeholders and translate requirements into build • Mentor engineers and squad tech leads to understand and deliver on the architecture • Shape MLOps routes to live, CI/CD and generative AI abstraction layers • Model the cost, feasibility and risk of different LLMs and implementation approaches THE STACK AWS, Bedrock, LangGraph, LangChain, Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Airflow, React, Next.js, Kubernetes. YOUR EXPERIENCE • 15+ years in enterprise software engineering with a background in product engineering organisations or technology companies • Deeply technical: recent evidence of designing systems from scratch and driving architectural decisions across multiple teams • Agentic AI delivered in production, ideally LangGraph or LangChain, with strong Python and FastAPI • AWS architecture at scale, with a preference for open standards over cloud-native lock-in • Full-stack understanding across FE, BE, ML/AI and data • Comfortable challenging engineering decisions at code level while operating at architecture level • Strong tenure and a coherent technical career trajectory • Aviation, logistics or supply chain domain experience a bonus THE PROCESS Two stages. Stage 1 is a technical whiteboard: designing an agentic AI document processing platform. Stage 2 is a final with the hiring manager. THE DETAILS Up to £800/day. 3 days per week on site in West London, occasional central London, some European travel possible.