Job Specifications
AI Research Engineer London, hybrid (1 or 2 days in the office), £70,000 to £80,000 benefits.
This is a great opportunity if you enjoy turning cutting edge AI ideas into working products. You will be at the heart of a growing AI function, shaping real AI first services, experimenting with the latest LLMs, and building agents that make a visible difference to customers and colleagues.
The Company
They are a digitally led specialist insurer that operates very much like a technology company. Data, AI and automation are central to their strategy, with significant investment dedicated to building out their AI capability. You will join a close knit team of AI, engineering and product specialists who are focused on delivering practical, high impact solutions rather than purely academic research. The culture is collaborative, flexible and outcomes driven.
The Role
In this AI Research Engineer role, you will:
Prototype, test and compare LLMs and embeddings against real product and operations use cases.
Build and enhance AI first product features, including internal AI assistants that boost staff productivity.
Develop AI agents that support the end to end claims journey, from logging and validation through to assessment and settlement, deployed on Google Cloud Platform.
Design and improve evaluation frameworks to measure accuracy, completeness and quality of outcomes, and run ongoing testing and monitoring.
Work directly with Claims Operations and product stakeholders so you can demonstrate capability, gather feedback and iterate quickly.
Collaborate with platform engineers so that your prototypes can be productionised and scaled across the business.
Your Skills & Experience
To succeed in this role, you will bring:
Strong Python skills, with experience building backend services and integrating REST and JSON APIs.
Hands on experience working with LLMs and embeddings, including prompt design, function calling, RAG patterns and vector databases.
Confidence running rapid experiments and evaluating models for performance, safety, completeness and cost.
Solid experience with Google Cloud Platform, ideally including Vertex AI, Model Garden, BigQuery and Cloud Run or Cloud Functions.
The ability to turn ideas and requirements into working prototypes that clearly demonstrate value.
A research minded approach, either through a PhD or experience in an applied research or advanced engineering role.
It would also be helpful if you have:
Exposure to document processing such as text normalisation, chunking strategies and metadata handling.
Experience with DevOps practices including Git, CI/CD, Docker, observability and A/B testing.
Previous collaboration with operations or customer facing teams to validate and refine AI behaviour.
What They Offer
£70,000 to £80,000 plus benefits.
Hybrid and flexible working, with genuine autonomy over how and where you work.
Strong focus on learning and development so you can deepen your AI research and engineering skills.
Private medical cover, pension scheme and life insurance.
Generous holiday allowance with the option to buy or sell additional days.
Staff discounts on products, wellbeing initiatives and access to retail discounts.
The chance to help shape a growing AI function and build flagship AI products from an early stage.
About the Company
Harnham provides specialist Data and AI recruitment and staffing services, along with bespoke training solutions, across multiple industry verticals, operating in the UK, the USA and EU - contact us today to discuss your requirements: info@harnham.com
Our recruitment and talent teams cover all aspects of the data and AI pipeline, from collection to consumption, across multiple data roles and functions.
Whether you need full-time staff, contract talent, specialized training, Data-qualified graduates, or C-suite executives...
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