Founding ML Engineer (Spectrum)

🔒 Confidential Employer
Posted 7 May 2026
LOCATION
London
TYPE
Full-time
LEVEL
Mid-Senior level
CATEGORY
Software Engineering
This employer holds a UK Home Office sponsor license — sponsorship for this specific role is at the employer’s discretion

SKILLS

LLMs Prompt Engineering LangChain Vector Databases RAG Python MLOps Agentic Frameworks

FULL DESCRIPTION

Founding ML Engineer (Spectrum)

[Employer hidden — sign up to reveal]' startup incubator Spectrum seeks a top-class ML Engineer to own the AI/ML stack and define the research agenda. This role is based in multiple locations including London, United Kingdom, with remote options.

Responsibilities

  • Designing and building the ML/LLM solution for data ingestion, knowledge extraction, retrieval, and subsequent reasoning.
  • Creating the datasets, metrics, and pipelines that drive measurable improvements across the system.
  • Architecting and improving agents for context retrieval, knowledge extraction, and data alignment, which includes prompt engineering, model selection, and inference optimization.
  • Establishing MLOps practices, including orchestration, observability, and experiment tracking.
  • Collaborating with the engineering team on system design and with [Employer hidden — sign up to reveal] Research on the research agenda.
  • Defining hiring criteria, growing the ML team, and shaping the ML team culture.

Requirements

  • A proven track record as an ML/AI Lead.
  • At least five years of experience in ML/AI systems, with at least two years focused on LLMs and generative AI.
  • A deep understanding of the LLM ecosystem, including model architectures and fine-tuning approaches.
  • Hands-on experience with: Prompt engineering and LLM pipeline design, Agentic frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangSmith, smolagents), Vector databases and RAG patterns, Deploying LLM-powered applications using APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic) or open-source models.
  • Strong Python skills – Kotlin knowledge would be a plus.
  • Excellent communication skills.
  • Proficiency in English.

Ideal Candidate

  • Experience with ontologies, knowledge graphs, or graph-based reasoning.
  • Experience in early-stage startups.
  • Ability to think strategically about product-led AI.
  • Background in code analysis, developer tools, or software engineering research.
  • Experience with multi-agent systems or complex agentic workflows.
  • Actively contributed to relevant open-source projects or publications.

What We Offer

  • A competitive salary and [Employer hidden — sign up to reveal] benefits.
  • A generous runway and corporate resources with startup autonomy.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We process your data in accordance with our Recruitment Privacy Policy.

Sign up free — access 45,000+ UK sponsor-licensed jobs