Principal AI Engineer, Edinburgh

Multiverse

Multiverse is the upskilling platform for AI and Tech adoption. We have partnered with 1,500+ companies to deliver a new kind of learning that's transforming today’s workforce. Our upskilling apprenticeships are designed for people of any age and career stage to build critical AI, data, and tech skills. Our learners have driven $2bn+ ROI for their employers, using the skills they’ve learned to improve productivity and measurable performance. In April 2026, we announced $70 million in strategic funding, led by Schroders Capital, with participation from StepStone Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners and General Catalyst. At an increased valuation of $2.1bn, the round makes us Europe’s first EdTech double unicorn. But we aren’t stopping there. With a strong operational footprint and 800+ employees, we have ambitious plans to continue scaling. We’re building a world where tech skills unlock people’s potential and output. Join Multiverse and power our mission to equip the workforce to win in the AI era. THE OPPORTUNITY Multiverse is the UK’s largest apprenticeship provider and its first EdTech unicorn. The current state of AI presents a huge opportunity to reshape the future of education and workforce development — and Multiverse is in a uniquely strong position to do that. Getting it right has implications beyond the company: for the UK tech sector and the broader economy. The Scotland hub exists to make that real. A new engineering team with the mandate to build AI-native products, help modernise the existing platform, and set the practices that make Multiverse an AI-first company. Multiverse has built an environment where AI-native ways of working collapse the old boundaries, so one person can own the whole arc from idea to live product. As an AI Engineer at P6, you’re a specialist and a core builder. You’re the go-to person for your product domain — someone who can take a hard problem, make the right design calls within it, and ship something that works for real users. You won’t be waiting for the work to be broken down for you. You’ll work in a small, focused squad led by a Principal engineer, with full ownership of your slice of the system from design through to production. WHAT YOU’LL DO * Own and deliver agent features end-to-end. Take a product problem — a coaching workflow, a content pipeline, a retrieval system — and build the agent feature that solves it. Architecture within your domain, implementation, evaluation, and production operation. You are responsible for it working, not just for your code compiling. * Design context and retrieval strategies. Decide what goes into the context window and what stays out. Build retrieval pipelines, conversation memory, and summarisation logic that makes context useful rather than noisy. Understand the cost and quality trade-offs at every layer. * Build and maintain evaluation frameworks. Define the metrics that tell the team whether its AI systems are doing what they should. Build automated eval pipelines and human-in-the-loop review processes. Treat evaluation as an engineering discipline, not an afterthought. * Design tool integrations. Agents are only as capable as the systems they can reach. Build the tool layer: MCPs, APIs, data contracts, and the error handling that makes tool use reliable across the systems your agents interact with. * Shape technical direction within your domain. You have strong opinions about how things should be built and you back them up. Contribute to design reviews, push back when the approach is wrong, and propose better paths. Your technical judgement shapes what gets built and how within your squad. * Raise the bar through review and pairing. Review code with rigour and give feedback that makes engineers better. Pair with less experienced colleagues on hard problems and help set the standard for production-quality AI engineering on the team. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR Production AI Engineering You’ve shipped AI-powered features to real users. You understand what separates a prototype from a production system: context quality, model selection trade-offs, token economics, reliable tool use, and evaluation that runs before you ship. You don’t need multi-agent architecture at this level, but you build the systems that sit inside one. Depth in Your Domain You’re a subject matter expert in at least one area of the AI engineering stack — retrieval, context management, evaluation, tool design, or backend systems that support agents. You can demystify that area for the team and make better decisions within it than most. Full-Stack Delivery You work across the stack — LLM integration, backend services, data pipelines, and enough frontend to ship end-to-end. You build with Claude Code daily, set context before generating, and review output critically. AI-native development is how you work, not a shortcut you reach for occasionally. Product Instinct You ask “what problem are we solving and for whom?” before “what framework should we use?” You talk to users, understand their workflows, and make calls about what’s worth building without waiting for a spec. WHAT WOULD SET YOU APART * Experience building AI systems in EdTech, regulated content, or domains where output quality has compliance or accreditation implications * Background as a founding or early-stage engineer at a startup * Experience with multi-agent coordination: task decomposition, handoff, and shared state * Practical experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or equivalent agent integration standards * Published thinking or external contributions in AI engineering — talks, writing, open source Benefits * Time off - 27 days holiday, plus 5 additional days off: 1 life event day, 2 volunteer days, 2 company-wide wellbeing days (M-Powered Weekend) and 8 bank holidays per year * Health & Wellness- private medical Insurance with Bupa, a medical cashback scheme, life insurance, gym membership & wellness resources through Wellhub and access to Spill - all in one mental health support * Hybrid work offering - for most roles we collaborate in the office three days per week with the exception of Coaches and Instructors who collaborate in the office once a month * Work-from-anywhere scheme - you'll have the opportunity to work from anywhere, up to 10 days per year * Space to connect: Beyond the desk, we make time for weekly catch-ups, seasonal celebrations, and have a kitchen that’s always stocked! Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion We’re an equal opportunities employer. And proud of it. Every applicant and employee is afforded the same opportunities regardless of race, colour, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. This will never change. Read our Equality, Diversity & Inclusion policy here. Our Commitment to Safeguarding Multiverse is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of our learners. We expect all employees to share this commitment and adhere to our Safeguarding Policy, our Prevent Policy and all other Multiverse company policies. Successful applicants will be required to undertake at least a Basic check via the Disclosure Barring Service (DBS). For roles that will involve a Regulated Activity, successful applicants must also undergo an Enhanced DBS check, including a Children’s Barred List check and a Prohibition Order check. Roles involving Regulated Activity may interact with vulnerable groups, therefore are exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 meaning applicants are required to declare any convictions, cautions, reprimands, and final warnings. Providing false information is an offence and could result in the application being rejected or summary dismissal if the applicant has been selected, and possible referral to the police and the DBS.

CreateFuture

CreateFuture is fast becoming the UK’s most recognisable digital consultancy, with years of experience building digital products and services for major organisations whilst putting our people first. We have offices in the centre of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester and London as well as remote employees located throughout the country.  We are a team of creators - whether that’s code, project plans, go to market strategies, culture initiatives, marketing campaigns, large language models or people policies. And together, with our clients, we create the future. This has seen us collaborate and partner across a multitude of industries and sectors, with the likes of PayPal, Adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert to name just a few. Our reputation as a partner determined to deliver high-quality, robust and thoughtful products has enabled us to scale to over 500 people in the last couple of years, and it is our amazing people - along with the safe, supportive and friendly culture we have built - that makes CreateFuture a great place to work. Don’t just take our word for it though, we have been recognised by Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row - across a number of categories - and our employee exit rate is astonishingly low. Join us on our journey… Let’s create something awesome, together, today. PRINCIPAL ENGINEER ABOUT THIS ROLE The bar has moved. Five years ago a strong engineer was measured by what they could build and how well they could mentor others to build it. Today, with Claude Code and agents, we produce quality work at a speed that would have looked superhuman in 2022. What separates exceptional from good is no longer typing speed or local craftsmanship. It is the complete package: architecture, deep engineering foundations, communication, system thinking, and the judgement to direct both your own intelligence and AI toward outcomes that matter.  Exceptional people at this level are not the best implementer in the room; they are the person whose specifications, decisions, and review judgement compound into systems that work in production and that others (and agents) can build on. They are a force multiplier, they hold a room at the highest levels, and clients treat them as the SME by default. YOUR MINDSET The mindset is the engine, and it is almost impossible to teach retrospectively. You are outcome obsessed, not output obsessed and you care whether the problem was actually solved - you resist the ego instinct to admire a clever solution and ask whether it was needed at all. You are intellectually honest about uncertainty, taking a trust-but-verify approach and assuming the surprising bug is the one that will burn. You are deeply pragmatic, which matters at CreateFuture where pace counts: you have outgrown the religious wars about platforms, languages and patterns, you hold opinions loosely, and you decide for the systems in front of you, not the ones you wish you had. You have a bias toward delivery: the smallest thing that works, then iterate, treating documents and meetings as means to that end.  And you are relentlessly curious beyond any immediate need, wanting to know how the database actually stores things or why a Claude Opus inference call costs what it does, which keeps you several layers ahead while the rest of the team is still reading the API docs. AI AS THE ACCELERANT For a Principal to be truly exceptional, this is now already a first-class competency in your arsenal, not a side skill.  An engineer who is brilliant by last year's standards but not fluent with AI is not exceptional in 2026. In practice that means: * Setting AI up to succeed. You treat context engineering as a craft (the right files, specs, examples and constraints), and you architect systems with clean interfaces, good naming, machine-readable specs and knowledge bases so the codebase is a quality baseline AI can work on later. No separate ivory-tower architect required. * Reviewing and choosing well. You read far more code than you write, and your value is in the quality of review: catching the silent assumption, the security flaw, the architectural drift, knowing where models fail and looking there first. You pick the right tool for the job (Claude Code for a deep refactor, an inline assistant when that is enough, a sub-agent for parallel work, the right model for analysis versus generation) and you know the constraints differ by client, an enterprise like PayPoint or Natwest versus a scale-up type business like Zuto or OAG. * Working with non-determinism. You see where AI moves the bottleneck and help people left and right of you unblock the value stream. You build with AI components but know success is no longer a binary, reaching for evals, golden datasets, structured outputs and fallback paths as naturally as you reach for unit tests. TECHNICAL BREADTH ACROSS THE FULL STACK Exceptional means depth in at least one area but competence everywhere the system reaches. * Backend: an instinct for distributed systems (what fails, what is eventually consistent, where queues back up), APIs that age well, thoughtful data modelling, and an understanding that languages are mostly syntax differences you can close with AI. * Cloud: cost-aware and security-aware by default, reaching for IaC, composing the primitives rather than stitching together managed services and hoping it works. * Data: modern pipelines, governance and lineage, increasingly vector stores and embeddings, with data quality treated as seriously as production code because garbage in, garbage out is far worse once AI features depend on it. * Web and mobile: past the framework arguments, with a clear view on what you would pick today, and able to build "good enough" front ends yourself with AI. Full-stack here means seeing the platform as one system and knowing which levers matter most. It does not mean front-end work with a few Node.js servers. SYSTEM THINKING, CONSULTING AND COMMERCIAL JUDGEMENT At CreateFuture we work in a consultancy context, where many otherwise excellent IC engineers can struggle.  You know technology is roughly 30% of the picture; the rest is design, argument and reasoning, commercial and political acumen, and the clarity to frame outcomes for a COO, CTO, CIO or CEO in their own language. You know when gold-plating is wasteful, you can name when a project's real problem is not technical and say so even when it is awkward, and you have a strong sense of what is durable versus what is fashion.  You are not the engineer who introduced the team to seven new technologies last year; you are the one who removed three and quietly made the remaining stack stronger. LEADERSHIP MENTALITY Technical work is necessary but no longer sufficient. By default you raise the level of everyone around you, regardless of discipline. * Communicate clearly and frequently (documents, decisions, post-mortems, design notes); the written artefact is the machine-readable context we can feed to AI later. * Make decisions and own them. You don't escalate everything or hoard control, and you are willing to be the benevolent dictator when it is your turn. * Mentor in AI fluency, not just code: tooling, prompting and review discipline, so your team is twice as productive a year from now. * Need little line management. You communicate upwards, raise by exception, self-resolve, and can be trusted with financial controls. * Disagree well. You tell people they are wrong with evidence and no ego, and you change your own mind when you are shown to be wrong. WHAT WE'RE NOT LOOKING FOR * The gifted engineer who sits in a silo. This is a team game. * The one who is fluent with AI but ships without the guardrails and quality gates enterprise clients expect. * The one with strong technical opinions who cannot justify them commercially and gets defensive when challenged. * The pure manager who wants to orchestrate teams rather than get involved. This is about setting a new standard, not coordinating it. * The engineer who will not immerse in a client environment. This role will mean on-site work and trusted relationships built in person. We are not going back to working away from the client and being bypassed.     WHAT WE’LL OFFER YOU: We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do. We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed. We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look. OUR HIRING PROCESS We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process. It usually looks like this: * Call with our Talent Acquisition Team  * Role specific capability interview  Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens. INCLUSION AT CREATEFUTURE  We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help. We look forward to your application!

Scott Logic

This is a hands-on, client-facing role, offering the opportunity to shape impactful technology projects for our clients. You’ll typically provide technical leadership for one or more multidisciplinary teams delivering small to medium projects, or with the support of a Principal Architect on advisory engagements or larger programmes of work. You’ll have the opportunity to further develop your career by working alongside colleagues with a wide range of architectural experience, participating in our community of practice and contributing to our thought leadership (blogs, white papers, etc).