Lead AI Research Engineer Location: Hybrid/London Salary: £100,000 £150,000 + benefits Be the driving force behind the next generation of AI in education. A rare opportunity to shape the future. We re working with a global SaaS leader in education and workforce analytics, backed by major private equity investment and trusted by thousands of schools worldwide. They re now building a dedicated AI RandD function, and this is your chance to join as the founding Lead AI Research Engineer. If you re looking for a role where you can explore, experiment, and deliver real impact at global scale, this is it. What you ll be doing You ll sit within a small, focused RandD team with a clear brief: build it, prove it, scale it. Working directly with the Global CTO and senior .NET engineering leaders, you ll research, prototype, and deploy AI capability that will shape the company s product ecosystem for years to come. You will: Identify high-impact opportunities to embed AI, ML, and agentic systems across a global SaaS platform Build prototypes, MVPs, and proofs-of-concept using real production data Experiment with LLMs, automation frameworks, advanced ML models, and emerging AI tooling Evaluate and integrate third-party APIs and open-source frameworks Develop reusable components and reference architectures Collaborate with partners including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and others Share knowledge, mentor engineers, and help embed AI-first thinking across teams This isn t a research-paper