Principal AI Engineering Lead (GenAI & MLOps)

Why this job is important

AI is moving quickly but building AI that people can trust — and that works reliably at enterprise scale takes strong engineering discipline. In this role, you’ll help shape the future of our AI‑enabled enterprise platforms by bringing together AI engineering, software architecture, and data science to deliver systems that are scalable, secure, and responsibly designed. You’ll focus on turning real business needs into robust products: from designing how AI is embedded into platforms, to ensuring performance, monitoring, and governance are built in from day one.

This is a principal individual-contributor role, leading through technical authority, design ownership, and mentoring rather than formal line management.

What you’ll be doing

• Leading the design and delivery of AI‑enabled enterprise platforms, from early architecture through to production.
• Building and improving applied AI solutions (including LLM-based patterns such as embeddings, retrieval approaches, and model tuning where appropriate). [Principal_...ad_AI_0426 | Word]
• Setting engineering standards for MLOps: CI/CD, model deployment, monitoring, evaluation, and operational reliability.
• Architecting secure, cloud-native services (microservices, APIs, messaging/event-driven patterns) that support AI workloads at scale.
• Coaching engineers and collaborating across Engineering, Data Science, and Product to turn complex AI concepts into practical delivery plans.

The skills & experience needed

• Experience building, deploying, and maintaining machine learning and generative AI solutions (e.g., LLMs, embeddings, retrieval patterns, vector search, model fine‑tuning).
• Strong MLOps knowledge across continuous integration, deployment, monitoring, and evaluation of AI/ML models.
• Experience with AI infrastructure (orchestration pipelines, GPU compute, model hosting services) and scalable AI data structures (including vector databases/semantic search).
• Deep software engineering capability in .NET Core/C# and modern back-end engineering, with flexibility to work across languages such as Python, Go, or TypeScript.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, microservices, cloud-native patterns, and modern data stores (SQL and NoSQL).
• Secure coding mindset with awareness of cybersecurity risks, particularly around AI and data privacy.
• Proven technical leadership (principal engineer/tech lead/architect level), with a track record of mentoring and influencing engineering direction.

What’s in it for you (UK benefits)

• Flexible hybrid working
• 25 days leave, 2 days paid for volunteering and life event leave
• Competitive salary and bonus (bonus dependent on role)
• Company pension
• Enhanced parental leave
• Healthcare options
• Wide range of flexible benefits

We are open to hiring in the London, Porto, Bangalore and Hyderabad for this position.

Location

Kantar Rewards Statement

At Kantar we have an integrated way of rewarding our people based around a simple, clear and consistent set of principles. Our approach helps to ensure we are market competitive and also to support a pay for performance culture, where your reward and career progression opportunities are linked to what you deliver. 

We go beyond the obvious, using intelligence, passion and creativity to inspire new thinking and shape the world we live in. Apply for a career that’s out of the ordinary and join us. 

We want to create an equality of opportunity in a fair and supportive working environment where people feel included, accepted and are allowed to flourish in a space where their mental health and well being is taken into consideration. 

We want to create a more diverse community to expand our talent pool, be locally representative, drive diversity of thinking and better commercial outcomes. 

Kantar is the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company. We understand more about how people think, feel, shop, share, vote and view than anyone else. Combining our expertise in human understanding with advanced technologies, Kantar’s 30,000 people help the world’s leading organisations succeed and grow.