Lead AI Engineer

Team: Technology

Salary Range: £90,000 - £100,000 per annum

Role Type: Full-Time, Permanent 

Start date: As soon as possible 

Visa / Sponsorship Available: Not Available 

 

The Lead AI Engineer Role  

As we continue our mission to be the market-leading insurance platform for agile insurers, we’re excited to begin the search for a Lead AI Engineer to help shape the next generation of intelligent capabilities within the Send platform.

In this role, you will lead the design, development, and productionisation of AI-powered services built on top of public large language models (LLMs), enabling insurers to unlock deeper insights, automate workflows, and enhance underwriting decisions. You will own the end-to-end lifecycle of AI features-from rapid prototyping through to resilient, observable, production-grade systems-within a regulated financial services environment.

This is a hands-on leadership role where you will set the technical direction for AI engineering at Send, mentor a growing team, and collaborate closely with data engineering, product, and compliance teams. Together, you will deliver AI capabilities that are scalable, secure, auditable, and deliver real commercial value to insurers using the Send platform.

 

About Send 

We are the leading insurance platform, trusted by world-class insurers to help them navigate complex risks.

Our platform helps commercial insurers, MGAs and reinsurers modernise underwriting, cut friction, and grow profitably in complex markets.

We are the only platform purpose-built for multi-operating models. Our platform combines deep industry expertise with the ability to support a range of strategies and operating models.

Our Story:

We started Send because insurers had been let down for too long by rigid, legacy technology. The industry was ready to work differently – and so were we.

In 2017, our three founders set out with a clear vision: to transform commercial underwriting by combining advanced technology with deep industry expertise.

By 2019, we delivered our first commercial and specialty underwriting platform for Aviva GCS, streamlining operations, increasing efficiency, and giving teams the visibility they needed to make faster, better decisions.

Over the next six years, we rolled out multiple underwriting platform solutions across the UK and US, proving that modern underwriting technology could be powerful, flexible, and rapidly delivered.

In 2022, we won three industry awards and secured a $10m Series A to accelerate our growth. By 2024, Send was recognised as a “Leader” by IDC, Celent, and Datos – a testament to our momentum and our customers’ success.

In 2025, we doubled in size and deepened our expertise in both the London Market and North America – becoming the only underwriting platform purpose-built to support multiple operating models.

But we're not finished. Insurers want orchestration, not siloed systems. That’s why we continue to invest in our platform and orchestration engine – helping our customers win better business, faster.

  

The Send Team 

Over the past two years, Send has experienced significant growth, expanding our team by over 50% to more than 120 people. At the start of 2024, our team was primarily based in the UK and Poland. Since then, we’ve taken major steps toward building a global presence, with team members now located across the UK, US, India, and Ireland-all working collaboratively toward our vision of becoming the market-leading software platform for agile insurers.

 

Our Funding 

From 2017 to 2022, we bootstrapped our growth journey, building a profitable and stable company. In November 2022, following a year of strong customer and team growth, we secured $10 million in Series A funding to accelerate our expansion across the UK and US, as well as to further enhance our product development. We’re proud to have the support and expertise of our investors, Mercia and Breega.

We are now preparing for our Series B round and are excited about the growth acceleration this will enable. 

 

What You’ll Be Doing as a Lead AI Engineer 

 Designing and delivering AI-powered services

• Architect and build production-grade services that integrate with public LLM APIs (such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Cohere, or similar).
• Develop capabilities including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), fine-tuning pipelines, and agent-based workflows.
• Design robust API layers, orchestration patterns, and evaluation frameworks to ensure reliable, cost-efficient, and low-latency AI features.
• Implement guardrails, content filtering, and output validation suitable for a regulated financial services environment.

Building and evolving the AI platform

• Define and evolve Send’s AI platform architecture, including embedding stores, vector databases, prompt versioning, and experiment tracking.
• Build containerised, cloud-native services using modern infrastructure approaches (Docker, Kubernetes, serverless).
• Develop CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and infrastructure-as-code to support reliable AI delivery.
• Ensure strong observability across AI workloads, including logging, tracing, token usage monitoring, drift detection, and model performance dashboards.

AI governance, compliance, and risk

• Partner with compliance, risk, and information security teams to ensure AI capabilities meet regulatory expectations within financial services (FCA, PRA, GDPR).
• Lead the implementation and ongoing compliance of ISO 42001 (AI Management Systems), embedding governance and documentation into engineering processes.
• Establish model governance practices such as audit trails, explainability documentation, bias testing, and human-in-the-loop review processes.
• Own and evolve the responsible AI framework, covering data provenance, consent management, and model risk oversight.

Providing technical leadership

• Set the technical vision and roadmap for AI engineering at Send, evaluating emerging models, tooling, and techniques.
• Mentor and support engineers across the team, fostering a culture of experimentation, engineering excellence, and continuous learning.
• Represent AI engineering in cross-functional planning, architecture discussions, and strategic stakeholder conversations.

 

The Skills and Experience Needed for the Lead AI Engineer Role 

• Significant software engineering experience (typically 5+ years), with a strong focus on Python in production environments, including modern frameworks such as FastAPI or Starlette, dependency management, and robust testing practices.
• Proven experience building and shipping production services that integrate with public LLM APIs, including prompt design, agent or chain orchestration (e.g. LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or similar), and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures.
• Strong understanding of LLM fundamentals, including tokenisation, context windows, embeddings, vector similarity search, and the trade-offs between fine-tuning and in-context learning, alongside practical approaches to evaluating model performance.
• Hands-on experience building cloud-native AI/ML infrastructure on platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, including serverless compute, managed containers, object storage, and scalable networking.
• Experience working within a regulated environment (financial services, insurance, banking, or fintech), with an understanding of how compliance, governance, and risk considerations influence engineering decisions.
• Solid data engineering fundamentals, including experience with SQL, columnar data formats such as Parquet or Arrow, modern ETL/ELT patterns, and data pipeline orchestration tools such as Airflow or Prefect.
• A track record of technical leadership, contributing to architecture decisions, setting engineering standards, reviewing code, and mentoring other engineers within a team.

Nice to have

• Experience working with open-source or self-hosted LLMs (such as Llama or Mistral) and model serving frameworks like vLLM, TGI, or Triton.
• Familiarity with LLM evaluation and prompt-testing frameworks to systematically measure output quality across different use cases.
• Knowledge of advanced retrieval techniques such as hybrid search, re-ranking, knowledge graphs, or structured information extraction.
• Experience designing multi-agent systems, tool-use patterns, or autonomous AI workflows in production environments.
• Experience in insurance, insurtech, or underwriting data domains (e.g. bordereaux, claims, or underwriting workflows).
• Awareness of ISO 42001 or experience contributing to an AI governance or management framework aligned with the standard.
• Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects, technical publications, or active participation in the AI engineering community.

 

What’s on Offer - Life at Send 

Health Insurance - Provided through AXA, covering medical, dental, optical, mental health, and therapies. Employees also have free access to Spill, offering confidential mental health support and therapy.

Life Insurance - Covers four times your basic salary, along with Income Protection for up to 36 months at 75% of salary, including rehabilitation support.

Pension Scheme - A salary sacrifice pension scheme through Royal London. Send contributes 8%, with a minimum employee contribution of 4%.

Time Off - 25 days of annual leave, plus public holidays. We also offer volunteering time and a dedicated wellness day.

Learning and Development - An annual budget via Learnerbly, providing access to books, courses, conferences, and other resources to support your growth.

Check out Send’s public Handbook for more information about our product, recruitment process, team, benefits, and much more.

 

 

Lead AI Engineer Interview Process 

Our recruitment process for the Lead AI Engineer role consists of at least four stages: 

Stage 1 - Introductory Call with our in-house recruiter, Lou (30 minutes):
This will cover your background, motivations, and communication skills, along with an opportunity to learn more about Send and the role.

Stage 2 - Interview with Dan Pass, CTO (45 minutes)

Stage 3 - Interview with Alice Butler, Engineer and Phil Huntley, Product Manager (45 minutes).

Stage 4 – Interview with Greg Hall, Head of Engineering and Jason Einon, Head of DevOps

Final Stage - 30-minute Call with a Send Founder

 

 

At Send, we’re focused on strengthening our culture-not hiring people who simply “fit” into it. We believe that a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team drives innovation, creativity, better decision-making, and stronger performance.

If you’re interested in a role at Send but don’t meet every requirement listed, we still encourage you to apply. Research shows that women, Indigenous people, and individuals of colour often hesitate to apply for roles unless they meet every single qualification. We’re committed to changing that.

We welcome applications from everyone, regardless of background, ethnicity, or culture. We are committed to reviewing all applications fairly and do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, colour, religion or belief, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital or civil partnership status, family status, pregnancy or maternity, disability (visible or invisible), gender identity or expression, or any other legally protected status.

We know that inclusive hiring is an ongoing journey, and we’re always looking to improve. If you have feedback on our hiring or interview process, we’d love to hear it.

If you have specific needs or adjustments that would support you during the application process, you can share them in the space provided in your application-we want to ensure your experience is as smooth and comfortable as possible.

Need support with your application or have a question about the role? Email us at liam.longstaff-pagoni@send.technology.