AI Engineer

Robert Half
London, United Kingdom
5 days ago
Job Type
Contract
Work Location
Hybrid
Seniority
Mid
Education
Degree
Posted
26 May 2026 (5 days ago)

Robert Half Technology are assisting a leading sports media organisation to recruit an AI Engineer on a 6-month contract basis. ASAP start. Outside IR35. Hybrid working - London based.

Role

* The AI Engineer will design, develop, and deploy scalable AI and machine learning solutions across digital sports media platforms.
* Collaborate with product, data, and engineering teams to deliver AI-driven features and audience engagement tools.
* Build and optimise LLM-powered applications, recommendation systems, and intelligent content workflows.
* Develop and maintain robust data pipelines and model deployment infrastructure.
* Implement monitoring, evaluation, and governance processes for AI systems to ensure reliability and performance.
* Work with structured and unstructured datasets including video, social, audience, and editorial content.
* Optimise AI models and inference pipelines for scalability, latency, and cost efficiency.
* Troubleshoot and resolve issues across AI systems, APIs, and production environments.
* Keep abreast of emerging AI technologies, industry trends, and best practices within sports media and entertainment.

Profile

* The AI Engineer will have strong experience developing and deploying machine learning and generative AI solutions in production environments.
* Strong Python engineering skills with experience using frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, LangChain, or similar.
* Experience working with LLMs, prompt engineering, vector databases, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) architectures.
* Strong knowledge of cloud platforms including AWS or Azure.
* Experience with data engineering and orchestration tools such as Databricks, Airflow, Docker, and Kubernetes is desirable.
* Must have previous experience working within a small to medium-sized business (SME), start-up, or scale-up environment.
* Comfortable operating in fast-paced, evolving businesses with changing priorities and hands-on delivery expectations.
* Strong understanding of APIs, microservices, and scalable backend systems.
* Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills with strong attention to detail.
* Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work effectively in cross-functional teams.
* Previous experience within media, sports, broadcasting, or digital content environments would be advantageous.

Company

* Leading sports media organisation with offices in London
* Hybrid working environment
* Fast-paced, collaborative, and technology-driven culture

Salary & Benefits

The salary range/rates of pay is dependent upon your experience, qualifications or training.

Robert Half Ltd acts as an employment business for temporary positions and an employment agency for permanent positions. Robert Half is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. Suitable candidates with equivalent qualifications and more or less experience can apply. Rates of pay and salary ranges are dependent upon your experience, qualifications and training. If you wish to apply, please read our Privacy Notice describing how we may process, disclose and store your personal data:

Related Jobs

View all jobs

AI Engineer - FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer)

Databricks United Kingdom
Remote

AI Platform Engineer (DevOps / MLOps Focus)

The Portfolio Group London, United Kingdom
£80,000 pa On-site

AI Application/Big Data Engineer

ARM London, United Kingdom
Hybrid

Data & AI Engineer

Tenth Revolution Group Ireland, Alba / Scotland, ZE2 9GA, United Kingdom
£36,000 – £40,000 pa

Forward Deployed AI Engineer

Palantir Technologies United States
Hybrid

Data and AI Engineer

Tenth Revolution Group Manchester, United Kingdom
£45,000 – £51,000 pa

Industry Insights

Discover insightful articles, industry insights, expert tips, and curated resources.

Where to Advertise Data Engineering Jobs in the UK (2026 Guide)

Where to advertise data engineering jobs UK in 2026: the specialist boards and channels that reach Spark, dbt, Snowflake and platform engineering talent. Data engineers occupy a distinct discipline that sits between software engineering, data science and cloud infrastructure — and the strongest candidates identify firmly with the data engineering community rather than with adjacent roles. General job boards consistently conflate data engineering with data analysis, data science and BI development, producing high application volumes but low candidate quality for specialist pipeline and platform roles. This guide, published by DataEngineeringJobs.co.uk, covers where to advertise data engineering roles in the UK in 2026, how the main platforms compare, what employers should expect to pay, and what the data says about hiring across different role types.

Data Engineering Jobs UK 2026: What to Expect Over the Next 3 Years

Data Engineering Jobs UK 2026: roles, salaries and the trends shaping UK data engineering hiring over the next three years — Spark, dbt, lakehouse and AI. Data engineering has become one of the most strategically important disciplines in the entire technology sector — and one of the most reliably in-demand. Every organisation that wants to use data to make decisions, train AI models, personalise products, manage risk, or understand its customers depends on data engineers to build the infrastructure that makes any of that possible. Without well-designed, reliable data pipelines, the most sophisticated machine learning model is worthless and the most ambitious analytics strategy is undeliverable. That foundational importance has made data engineering hiring remarkably resilient through the technology market corrections of the past few years. Where headcount reductions fell heavily on some engineering disciplines, demand for data engineers held firm — because the work of building and maintaining data infrastructure cannot be deferred in the way that some product development can. The data keeps coming. The pipelines need to work. But the data engineering jobs market of 2026 is not simply a stable version of what it was three years ago. The discipline has undergone a series of architectural shifts — from batch to streaming, from on-premise data warehouses to cloud-native lakehouses, from hand-rolled pipelines to declarative transformation frameworks, and most recently toward AI-augmented data engineering workflows that are beginning to reshape what the role looks like in practice. The employers hiring data engineers today are asking for a meaningfully different skill set than those hiring three years ago. The candidates who will thrive over the next three years are those who understand where the discipline is heading — which architectural patterns are becoming standard, which technologies are defining the modern data stack, and how the definition of a data engineering career is evolving toward a richer intersection of infrastructure, analytics, and AI enablement. This article breaks down what the UK data engineering jobs market is likely to look like through to 2028 — covering the titles emerging right now, the technologies driving employer demand, the skills that will matter most, and how to position your career ahead of the curve.