Principal Engineer - Technical Lead (Gen AI and MACH Architecture)

At AKQA, we believe in the imaginative application of art and science to create beautiful ideas, products and services. With an entrepreneurial and collaborative approach, we design and build adaptive digital products, services and experiences that capture the imagination and deliver impressive returns for our clients.

We are looking for a senior, architecture-led Principal Engineer to join our London Technology team as a Technical Lead. This is a hands-on engineering role, not a strategy-only or evangelism position. You will spend the majority of your time designing, building and shipping enterprise-grade systems, with roughly 65 to 70% hands-on delivery and 30 to 35% technical leadership, architecture and team guidance.

You will lead the technical direction of complex client programmes across MACH architectures and production Generative AI; spanning Design to Code workflows, solution design and API contracts through to cloud infrastructure, deployment and ongoing operation. You will own architecture decisions, write and review production code, and mentor engineers, while remaining accountable for what ships, not just what is proposed.

Production Generative AI experience is essential. You must have at least three years' experience working with Generative AI, and have delivered at least one AI capability into a live, enterprise environment; not limited to prototypes, proofs of concept or demo builds. We need engineers who understand retrieval pipelines, evaluation, cost, governance and operational reliability at scale; including where custom model creation, fine-tuning or adaptation is required for production delivery.

AKQA is advanced in Design Systems and Design to Code practice; from Figma design systems through to UI development and application delivery. Generative AI is increasingly embedded across this design-to-application workflow, accelerating the path from design intent to production-ready code and experiences.

The Principal Engineer (Tech Lead) is a key technical contributor across the programme lifecycle, working closely with Technical Managers, cross-discipline teams and on-shore, off-shore and hybrid engineering squads.

This role sits at Principal or Staff Engineer seniority, aligned with our Technical Managers and Technical Architects in scope and influence. While client-facing and influential, the role is technologist-first. You may occasionally support pre-sales scoping or technical pitches, but your primary value is deep engineering craft, sound system design and reliable enterprise delivery. Technical architecture and hands-on engineering capability are mandatory.

Based in London (Farringdon), in a hybrid working environment, frequently collaborating with our global studios and partners, you will enjoy working in a team of highly skilled people, all with strong opinions about various technologies, frameworks and approaches.

You will articulate your ideas to colleagues effectively whilst also taking on board the ideas of others and remaining solutions focused. You will thrive when faced with new challenges, view them as opportunities and constantly look to improve client offerings. You will work in a progressive environment that fosters a meritocratic culture, surrounded by some of the brightest minds in their fields.

As a Principal Engineer (Tech Lead) at AKQA, you will be inspired by technology and have a passion for building robust, scalable solutions that perform in production.

ROLE REQUIREMENTS

Generative AI and Intelligent Experience Architecture

• Minimum three years' experience with Generative AI, including proven experience shipping at least one AI solution to production in an enterprise context (beyond prototypes or sandbox experiments).
• AI architecture for experience platforms: system design for intelligent products and services, including RAG, GraphRAG, agent orchestration and proximity / relevance evaluation.
• Hands-on implementation with Vercel AI SDK, Vercel AI Cloud and agentic cloud patterns for production AI experiences.
• AI content and data engineering: ingestion, cleansing, transformation, embedding, indexing and retrieval pipeline design.
• Integration across cloud AI services (e.g. GCP + Vertex AI, Vercel AI Cloud, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI) within a broader MACH and API-led landscape; with preference for GCP and Vercel, or suitable equivalents on AWS and Azure, and the capability to draw parallels across platforms.
• GEO and LLM optimisation: experience designing intelligent experiences and content structures optimised for generative engine discovery and LLM retrieval.
• Model fine-tuning: experience customising and fine-tuning existing models for production use cases; including data preparation, evaluation, versioning and deployment within enterprise governance, cost and reliability constraints.
• AI cost-value analysis, observability, governance, testing and evaluation frameworks for production systems.
• Practical application of Generative AI to marketing and experience challenges; e.g. personalisation, content generation, campaign optimisation; with measurable production outcomes.

Design Systems and Design to Code

• Design to Code workflow: advanced Design Systems thinking; experience bridging design intent through to UI development and production application builds.
• Generative AI in the design-to-application process: applying Gen AI to accelerate, validate and quality-assure the path from design to shippable code and experiences.
• Design and delivery tooling: experience with Figma, Cursor, Claude and Vercel v0 advantageous.

Platform, Architecture and Engineering

• Composable architecture: microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless composition; minimum eight years' experience designing and delivering MACH-based enterprise platforms.
• Cloud platforms: deep hands-on experience across GCP & Vertex AI and Vercel AI cloud, or equivalent alternatives on AWS and Microsoft Azure; infrastructure design, security and operational ownership, and the ability to draw parallels across cloud providers.
• API design: RESTful and GraphQL APIs, contract-first design, versioning, gateway patterns and integration across SaaS, CMS, DXP and MarTech stacks.
• Distributed systems and event-driven architecture: messaging, async workflows, resilience patterns, idempotency and at-scale system behaviour.
• Backend and platform engineering: advanced server-side development (Python recommended; additional languages a plus), service design and performance optimisation.
• Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD: automated build, test and deployment pipelines (e.g. Terraform, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab).
• Cloud and edge hosting: GCP, Vercel, AWS, Azure, Netlify and related deployment models.
• Front-end integration literacy: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Next.js + React; mobile technologies (SwiftUI, Kotlin, Flutter or React Native) advantageous.
• CMS, DXPs, MarTech and SaaS integration in complex enterprise landscapes; including headless CMS platforms such as Contentful, Sanity, ContentStack or similar.
• Workflow and delivery tooling: GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab, Atlassian, Azure DevOps, CI/CD cloud functions or similar.
• Automation, quality assurance and non-functional requirements: security, performance, reliability and maintainability.

QUALITIES AND CHARACTERISTICS

• Must be from a senior engineering, platform or architecture background; Principal, Staff or equivalent depth of hands-on experience.
• Builder-first mindset: you lead by doing, with architecture informed by what you have shipped in production.
• A continuous-improvement approach to engineering practice and team ways of working.
• Proactive self-starter with acute attention to detail and drive for improvement.
• Practically minded: excellent work in production matters more than abstract thought leadership.
• Advocate for improvements to processes, quality, security and operational excellence.
• Analytical, creative and positive mindset with a personable and professional approach.
• Sharp attention to detail and a passion for new technology, staying abreast with the latest developments in the industry.
• Professional written and verbal communication.
• Able to explain complex technical decisions to non-technical audiences (clients, stakeholders and team members).
• Champion continuous improvement and best-in-class software development processes.
• Contribute to technical discovery and be proactive in proposing engineering solutions to needs that other disciplines may not be aware of.

RECENT GENERATIVE AI WORK

A selection of recent Generative AI work from across AKQA:

• Google: Bringing emotion and intuition back to online shopping
• Netflix: It's What's Inside - The Game
• Nike: Never Done Evolving

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