AI Engineer Consultant

About the role

Career Directions Limited is looking for a senior, hands-on AI Engineer Consultant to support several active AI initiatives. The consultant works closely with a Data Scientist and with architecture, IT, data, business and delivery stakeholders, turning existing prototypes and technical concepts into maintainable, documented and reusable solutions rather than starting new research projects. The engagement lasts 3-4 months and starts as soon as possible after selection.

Key responsibilities

• Advance AI prototypes and engineering pipelines, building maintainable AI/ML components on Microsoft Azure and improving web-search orchestration, evidence capture, provenance, quality controls and assessment workflows.
• Implement persistent storage, versioning and incremental processing, and prototype dashboards, M365 agents or lightweight web apps; package solutions with sound software-engineering, security and deployment practices.
• Develop technical and architecture documentation, including reusable blueprints, templates, diagrams, checklists and handover materials, and support integrations such as Salesforce and ServiceNow.
• Develop and evaluate text-classification approaches, compare LLM, non-LLM, hybrid and minimal-LLM options, and assess models on accuracy, cost, latency, explainability, robustness and maintainability.
• Build or integrate AI solutions via APIs, working with structured and unstructured data and supporting grounded search, RAG, evidence management and agentic workflows.
• Take part in code and design reviews, maintain source control and technical decision records, and deliver knowledge transfer and handover materials.

Required profile

• Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving ability and excellent written and spoken English.
• Ability to explain technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience in Python, AI/ML and generative AI development, software engineering, Git, CI/CD, Azure, Azure AI Services / Microsoft Foundry, Azure Databricks, Azure SQL, Azure DevOps, text classification, model evaluation, API integrations, data handling, architecture documentation and responsible AI.
• Preferred: Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Platform, RAG, evidence provenance, knowledge engineering, agentic workflows, global health/public sector experience, and Microsoft Azure AI/Data/Cloud or Power Platform certifications.