Principal AI Engineer (GenAI Platforms & MLOps)

Why this job is important

Generative AI has moved quickly from experimentation to expectation — but making it work well, safely, and at scale is hard. In this role, you’ll help turn

GenAI into something teams across Kantar can rely on, not just prototype with.

You’ll design and build the foundations that enable production‑grade AI: reusable GenAI components, strong MLOps practices, and cloud‑native services that balance quality, cost, and reliability. Your work will help teams move faster, avoid common pitfalls, and deliver AI solutions that stand up in real‑world environments.

This is a hands‑on, individual‑contributor role. You won’t be managing people — instead, you’ll lead through technical expertise, curiosity, and a passion for solving complex engineering problems.

What you’ll be doing

• Designing and building GenAI platform components that help teams create and deploy AI solutions safely and efficiently
• Implementing LLM‑based systems, including RAG, embeddings, semantic search, and agent‑based workflows
• Shaping how GenAI systems handle prompting, grounding, evaluation, reliability, and cost control
• Building and evolving MLOps pipelines, from experimentation through deployment, monitoring, and iteration
• Engineering cloud‑native, API‑driven services that integrate AI into production platforms
•  Supporting and guiding other engineers through design reviews, coaching, and shared standards

The skills & experience we’re looking for

We don’t expect you to tick every box — if most of this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.

• Hands‑on experience building production AI or ML systems, with recent focus on Generative AI / LLMs
• A strong understanding of RAG architectures, embeddings, vector databases, and semantic retrieval
• Experience with MLOps, including deployment, monitoring, evaluation, and CI/CD for AI systems
• A solid software‑engineering background, building scalable backend services
• Experience working in cloud environments (Azure preferred, but AWS or GCP also welcome)

It’s a bonus if you’ve also:

• Designed AI platforms used by multiple teams
• Worked with responsible AI, governance, or secure AI deployment
• Tuned GenAI systems for performance, reliability, or cost

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

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.