Senior AI Software Engineer

• We will have you join our Channel Platforms team, which owns our customer conversation estate across voice, chat and email.
• You will own the intelligence layer of our AI products, including reasoning and orchestration, tools, knowledge retrieval, guardrails and evaluation.
• You will design and build agentic services on Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore Runtime, including multi-step orchestration, state and memory management, and graceful handling of failure and ambiguity.
• You will build and own the tool layer that agents act through, exposing business capabilities such as account lookup, billing and identity as reliable, well-described actions with sensible error semantics.
• You will build retrieval augmented generation over Bedrock Knowledge Bases, owning content preparation, chunking, embedding strategy, retrieval quality and answer grounding.
• You will treat prompts as engineering artefacts by versioning, testing and understanding what changes when behaviour shifts.
• You will build the evaluation harness, define accuracy, containment and safe behaviour metrics, assemble regression sets, and enable evidence-based release decisions.
• You will implement guardrails and safety controls, including PII handling, out-of-scope refusal, jailbreak resistance and clean escalation to a human advisor.
• You will engineer for latency and cost, including streaming, model selection and routing, caching and token budgets.
• You will instrument agent behaviour end to end so that tool failures, retrieval misses and abandoned conversations are visible in Datadog and QuickSight.
• You will support live AI services in production, investigate incidents, diagnose non-deterministic behaviour, and close the loop with permanent fixes.
• You will make and document build-versus-buy decisions, write Architecture Decision Records, and take designs through our AI governance board and change control process.
• You will track developments in the generative AI landscape and bring the parts that deliver clear benefit into our roadmap, with an honest view of risk and upside.

Technologies:

• AI
• AI Agents
• AWS
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Datadog
• Support
• LLM
• Python
• Security
• Serverless
• Terraform
• Product Owner

More:

We are a family of brands revolutionising how we power the planet, with around 21,000 colleagues working together to create a greener, fairer future and a cleaner energy system that does not rely on fossil fuels. We do energy differently: we make it, store it, move it, sell it and mend it. This is a UK-based hybrid role with occasional travel to site. We offer total rewards designed to support different realities and help our people and their families financially, physically and emotionally. We are a people place, and we want you to find purpose, growth and a team where your voice matters.

• We are looking for substantial software engineering experience, with strong Python and production code experience.
• We need demonstrable delivery of LLM or agentic systems into production for real users.
• We need hands-on experience with tool and function calling, multi-step agent orchestration, and managing conversational state across turns.
• We need production experience with retrieval augmented generation, including retrieval quality evaluation and answer grounding.
• We need a rigorous approach to evaluation, including building or owning an eval harness, defining relevant metrics, and using them to make release decisions.
• We need experience deploying and operating AI services in the cloud using serverless or container-based architectures, infrastructure as code such as Terraform, and CI/CD.
• We need practical application of responsible AI, covering data privacy, guardrails, bias, explainability, and human-in-the-loop design in a regulated environment.
• We need the ability to debug non-deterministic systems and reason about behaviour statistically.
• We need strong collaboration and communication skills.
• We need a degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Desirable: experience with Amazon Bedrock, including AgentCore Runtime, Bedrock Knowledge Bases and Bedrock Guardrails.
• Desirable: voice AI experience, including speech-to-speech models, real-time streaming, barge-in and turn-taking, or ASR and TTS pipelines.
• Desirable: any contact centre exposure, including Amazon Connect.
• Desirable: familiarity with agent interoperability standards such as the Model Context Protocol.
• Desirable: experience with fine tuning, distillation or model routing where it materially improved cost or latency.
• Desirable: delivery in a regulated industry, including working with vulnerable customer requirements or comparable obligations.
• Desirable: AWS certification at Associate level or above.
• We need core competencies in designing, integrating and operating AI-enabled solutions within enterprise environments, including prompt-driven workflows, retrieval-augmented systems and AI agents.
• We need structured evaluation, testing and monitoring practices to ensure AI outputs are reliable, secure and compliant with organisational guardrails.
• We need experience preparing and managing data used in AI workflows and taking responsibility for the responsible lifecycle of AI features from experimentation through deployment and continuous improvement.
• We need safe and responsible use of AI tools, with clear knowledge of when AI use is appropriate and strong awareness of accuracy, bias and compliance.
• We need the ability to design and reuse prompt templates to support consistent, high-quality workflow outputs, and to use AI to triage, classify and analyse information within our policy guardrails.
• We need the ability to recognise higher-risk scenarios and escalate to governance or security as needed.
• We need proficiency in enterprise AI co-pilots, knowledge assistants and AI-enhanced productivity tools.