{"id":190581,"url":"https://alion.io/job/motorway-lead-generative-ai-engineer","title":"Lead Generative AI Engineer","company":{"id":4269,"name":"Motorway","domain":"motorway.co.uk","url":"https://alion.io/company/motorway","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":106000,"max_usd":204000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":28},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-02T11:28:42Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-02","last_verified_at":"2026-11-01T07:13:03Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":59,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":59},"description":"About Motorway\nMotorway is the UK's largest online car-selling platform. We connect private sellers directly with over 8,000 dealers nationwide. Our online platform helps sellers achieve great prices for their cars while giving dealers fast, reliable access to the stock they want for their dealerships. Founded in 2017, our award-winning, technology-led approach has redefined the experience of selling a car. Motorway is backed by some of the world’s leading technology investors, having raised £143 million in Series C funding.\nThis is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing scale-up at a crucial phase of growth and help change an industry for the better.\nAbout the team\nGenAI Engineering sits within Motorway's Data and AI function, alongside Machine Learning and the Machine Learning Data Platform. We own the AI features that shape how buyers and sellers experience the marketplace, from agentic workflows in the customer journey to LLM-powered tooling for our dealer network.\nWhat we build goes into the hands of real sellers and thousands of verified dealers, usually within weeks. When it works, someone sells their car more easily. When it doesn't, we hear about it. That feedback loop is short, and it shapes how we work. We have a track record of successful deployments and a strong reputation as a result.\nOver the next two years the function scales from shipping AI features to running a serious GenAI platform.\nAbout the role\nWe're looking for a Lead GenAI Engineer to set the technical standard for AI work across the function, and to build the hardest parts of it themselves.\nYou'll own the architecture and standards for complex, product-facing GenAI work. You'll hold sign-off on the systems that carry real risk, and you'll be the person a squad comes to when they've hit something genuinely hard. This is a player-coach role: your own code sets the bar others refer back to, and you'll spend as much energy making senior engineers better as you do building.\nMost of what makes a GenAI feature good sits around the model rather than in it. The prompting is rarely the hard part. Retrieval quality is, and so is the data feeding it, evaluation you can trust, sensible behaviour when things fail, and getting it live and keeping it there. The standards that matter most here are the ones that make that work repeatable across teams. We're not precious about the route you took to this kind of engineering.\nIn this role, you will:\nSet the architecture standard for complex GenAI work across the function, not by mandate but by building things others learn from and want to adopt.\n\nHold sign-off on materially complex AI systems, catching architectural, safety and reliability problems before they reach production.\n\nOwn the shared foundations that determine feature quality across teams: retrieval patterns, evaluation infrastructure, data pipelines, and the tooling that makes good practice the easy path.\n\nBuild the hardest pieces of work directly, acting as the technical escalation point for the function's toughest problems.\n\nDesign for systems that stay up and stay affordable, covering graceful degradation, fallback behaviour, and cost and latency at production scale.\n\nDevelop the senior engineers around you by handing them harder problems, room to own decisions, and honest feedback.\n\nShape how we hire and review, bringing a clear and defensible view of what good looks like.\n\nBring specific, actionable industry insight into planning, explaining what a development means for our architecture rather than noting that the field moves fast.\n\nAbout you\nYou've set technical direction that other engineering teams actually adopted, and you can talk about where that worked and where it didn't.\n\nStrong Python, and SQL you genuinely use. A lot of this work is data work: grounding data, golden datasets, and understanding why something failed.\n\nDeep, current expertise across the GenAI stack, including retrieval at scale, vector stores, agentic orchestration, multimodal work, evaluation infrastructure and fine-tuning where it earns its place.\n\nYou're fluent in the layer underneath: MLOps tooling, deployment and cloud infrastructure (we run on AWS and GCP), and you can tell the difference between a choice that matters and one that doesn't.\n\nYou design systems that survive contact with production, and you've been on the hook when they didn't.\n\nA strong point of view on evaluation, including the difference between evals that catch regressions and evals that provide comfort.\n\nYour direct contributions set a quality bar for the people around you.\n\nYou explain hard technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders without either condescending or losing the substance.\n\nSelf-awareness about where your knowledge runs out, and the instinct to bring in expertise early.\n\nYou could be a great fit if\nYou build with taste, preferring simple systems that work over clever ones that nearly do.\n\nYou use authority sparingly. You're not a blocker, but you'll stop a bad decision from shipping.\n\nYou get satisfaction from the unglamorous work that makes AI features actually good, not just the part that demos well.\n\nYou enjoy making other engineers better as much as building things yourself.\n\nYou've levelled people up in a way they'd recognise, whether through a talk, a review, or how you work day to day.\n\nYou hold a two-to-three-year view without losing touch with what's shipping this month.\n\nBENEFITS\nWe've got your back, in life's biggest moments and the everyday ones too.\nCompetitive salary\n\nEquity scheme - we all share in Motorway's success\n\n25 days holiday\n\nFlexible working (2 days a week in our London office, with socials and snacks galore)\n\nPrivate medical insurance via BUPA\n\nLife assurance\n\nPension scheme (we contribute 5%)\n\nEnhanced family leave (e.g. 26 weeks full pay for maternity or adoption)\n\n24/7 Employee Assistance Programme\n\nEV leasing scheme\n\nCycle to work scheme\n\nNursery salary sacrifice scheme\n\n1 paid volunteering day a year","description_format":"text","description_chars":5990,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Flexible schedule","Health insurance","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Marketplaces"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-02T13:23:18Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"GB","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"Licensed UK visa sponsor (Skilled Worker)","filings_12m":null,"filings_prev_12m":null,"green_card_filings_12m":null,"median_offered_wage_usd":null,"route":"Skilled Worker","cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-31T06:23:40+00:00","sources":["UK Home Office: register of licensed sponsors 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