AI Engineer

About the role

We’re building AI systems for clients who need more than a chatbot bolted onto an API. This role is for someone who can go deep: fine-tuning models, deploying open-source LLMs, building agentic systems, and designing the infrastructure that makes AI products actually work in production.

Key Responsibilities

Design and own the architecture for AI-powered features across client projects, from model selection through to production deployment

Build agentic systems: tool use, multi-step reasoning, orchestration frameworks, and the harnesses that let models act reliably in real environments

Work hands-on with open-source models, including fine-tuning, quantisation, evaluation, and self-hosting where it makes sense

Build the infrastructure around AI systems: retrieval pipelines, vector stores, inference optimisation, monitoring and evals

Make the call on when to use a foundation model API versus when to fine-tune or self-host, and be able to justify it

Collaborate directly with clients to translate ambiguous problems into working AI systems

Stay ahead of the open-source and agentic tooling ecosystem so Gunpowder’s clients get informed, current recommendations, not last year’s stack

Requirements

Real experience building agentic systems, fine tuning models and opensource work, not just prompting a hosted API

Hands-on experience building agentic workflows: designing harnesses, tool-calling logic, and evaluation loops for agents that operate with real autonomy

Strong grasp of the open-source LLM landscape: tools, frameworks, trade-offs, licensing

Comfortable owning technical decisions end-to-end, from architecture to deployment

Practical engineering skills: Python, ML infra (Docker, cloud deployment, vector DBs), and the judgement to know what’s overkill and what isn’t

A builder’s instinct: you’d rather ship something real than write another slide about AI strategy