Principal AI Platform Engineer

Location: Stone, Staffordshire Hybrid working, 2 days a week in our Stone Office)

Status: Permanent

Package: Competitive Salary, Flexible Working, Development & Opportunity (Personal & Technical), Private Medical (Optical & Dental options), Matching Contributory Pension, 25 Days Leave + Public Holidays + Buy and Sell Scheme, Life Insurance, Referral Scheme, Employee Assistance Program, Benefits Hub.

Who’s Instem? Well, we’re a global provider of bespoke industry-leading software solutions and services, which facilitate the pre-clinical, and clinical phases of the drug discovery process. We have over fifteen products in our portfolio, used by over 700 pharmaceutical clients (including all the top 25!)

What’s the culture/environment like? For a global business of over 400 staff, we very much have a family feel. You’ll be part of a friendly, communal, solution based, flexible environment, where you’ll feel empowered, valued and accountable. We’ll invest in you as a person and encourage you to take part in companywide workshops for wellbeing, mental health, critical conversations, and strengths.

This is a principal-level individual contributor role within Platform Engineering, responsible for defining and delivering the AI platform that underpins Instem’s adoption of AI across both the enterprise and our product portfolio.

You will build the shared capabilities, integration patterns, and guardrails that enable teams to safely and effectively leverage AI — ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, observable, and aligned with regulatory expectations.

This role goes beyond platform build. You will enable adoption at scale: empowering teams to use AI confidently, embedding advanced capabilities into products, and ensuring consistent, production-grade approaches across the organisation.

You will take a vendor-agnostic approach, selecting models and platforms based on use case, cost, performance, and governance — balancing rapid innovation with long-term sustainability and control.

What are you responsible for?

AI Platform & Integration

• Define and build reusable AI platform capabilities on Azure
• Establish standard patterns for RAG, agents, tool use, and model lifecycle management
• Design secure integration patterns enabling AI to interact with enterprise systems, products, and external tools
  
  
  

Adoption & Enablement

• Enable teams across engineering, product, and corporate functions to safely adopt AI
• Provide reusable SDKs, templates, and reference architectures to accelerate delivery
• Drive practical adoption of AI tools (e.g. Microsoft 365 Copilot, agents, workflows) with measurable impact
  
  
  

Product AI

• Partner with product teams to embed advanced, production-grade AI capabilities into customer-facing solutions
• Define patterns for evaluation, fallback, human oversight, and auditability
• Ensure AI enhances product differentiation while remaining supportable and compliant
  
  
  

Platform as a Product

• Treat the AI platform as a product, with clear consumers, adoption metrics, and continuous improvement
• Optimise for usability, performance, and cost efficiency
  
  
  

Security, Governance & Resilience

• Define safe AI usage patterns across data, prompts, models, and outputs
• Ensure systems are resilient, observable, and aligned with regulatory and security requirements
• Embed governance into delivery, not just process
  
  
  

Leadership & Influence

• Influence architecture, product, and engineering teams as a senior individual contributor
• Help shape the organisation’s AI operating model and standards
• Mentor engineers and raise the bar for AI engineering across the organisation
  
  
  

Skills, Knowledge, Experience

Expected:

• Strong experience in platform, cloud, or software engineering, delivering production-grade systems at scale

Deep hands-on experience with modern AI systems, including LLMs, RAG, agents, and evaluation approaches

Proven experience building reusable platforms, services, or developer tooling adopted by multiple teams

Strong Azure experience, including AI services, identity (Entra), observability, and modern deployment patterns

Experience designing secure integration patterns across enterprise and product environments

Proficiency in Python and at least one of C# or TypeScript

Strong experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Bicep or equivalent) and CI/CD practices

Experience with observability and performance management, including AI-specific evaluation and monitoring

Strong understanding of security, identity, and access control in enterprise environments

Ability to influence without authority, working across multiple teams and disciplines

Experience working within structured governance frameworks (e.g. architectural review boards, QMS-aligned environments)

Desirable

• Experience in regulated environments (e.g. life sciences, healthtech, GxP)
• Familiarity with AI governance, data protection, and audit requirements (e.g. GDPR, 21 CFR Part 11)
• Experience with Microsoft 365 Copilot, agents, or enterprise AI workflow integration
• Familiarity with MCP or secure external tool integration patterns
• Knowledge of the Company’s Quality Management System and its application to tasks associated with this role
  
  
  

An Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

Instem stores and processes data using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). For more information regarding our privacy policy use the following link: https://www.instem.com/privacy/