Contract - Principal AI Engineer

Principal AI Engineer/ Data Scientist Contract - inside IR35 London - hybrid £700-£900 inside IR35 (potential flex, focus in on the right person) Join a high-impact AI R&D team at a major financial player, where you'll be working at the cutting edge of LLMs and agentic workflows in the investment space. The team partners with front office users to prototype AI-driven tools for research automation, portfolio construction, and decision support. This is an R&D-focused role where you’ll be experimenting with Python, LangGraph (or similar), vector databases, and prompt orchestration to prove out what's possible - then handing off validated concepts to engineering teams for scale-up. They’re open to either data scientists or engineers with strong Python and AI experience. You’ll need to be comfortable working in a fast-paced, collaborative environment and able to bridge technical experimentation with real investment use cases. If you have finance experience, that's great, but no worries if not, as long as you're willing to learn and engage with senior stakeholders. Key experience: Python for AI/ML, automation, or backend work Hands-on with LLMs, agent frameworks, or prompt engineering Exposure to investment data or a willingness to learn quickly AWS (or similar cloud) and rapid prototyping mindset Front-end exposure (e.g. React) is a nice-to-have but not required If you're an experienced engineer or scientist with a strong background in Python and commercial AI experience get in touch.