Senior AI Engineer

The Company 

RightShip is the maritime industry's leading safety and risk intelligence platform. We exist to advance the vision of a Zero Harm maritime industry by enabling better safety decisions across the ecosystem.

By combining trusted standards, AI-native technology, rich maritime data and industry expertise, RightShip transforms complex safety and operational risk into intelligence our customers can act on with confidence.

More than 1,000 organisations worldwide rely on RightShip to strengthen safety, improve resilience, simplify compliance and raise standards across global shipping. As RightShip evolves into a scalable intelligence platform, we continue to connect the global supply chain around a shared ambition: safer people, safer vessels and a safer, more sustainable industry.

To find out more visit RightShip.com. 

What we offer 

We offer a place where you know you are contributing to an organization who are constantly working to ensure ships are safe as possible so that crew and cargo are protected. We are passionate about maritime efficiency, safety and sustainability practices. 

We offer generous rewards. Our base salary is competitive, we support employee wellbeing and provide our employees with a Healthy Living Allowance and our annual incentive scheme is awesome. We have some great talent who are happy to share their experience and skills to help you on your way and we are committed to professional development to make sure your career keeps growing while you’re working with us.

What makes RightShip a great place to work at:

RightShip is an equal opportunity employer, and we champion diversity. Our teams are composed of individuals from different geographies, cultures, religions, ethnicities, races, genders, sexual orientations, abilities, and generations. We believe that a diversity of experiences makes us stronger-as individuals, as communities and as an organization.

Don’t meet every single requirement of this role? Still apply! Research tells us that that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply unless they meet every single requirement.  At RightShip we believe that the right hire is someone who makes an addition to our culture, rather than someone who fits in and conforms to our status quo. We want to add team members who not only value RightShip standards and workplace culture, but also bring an aspect of diversity that positively contributes to our work environment. If you are excited about this role, or about our company in general, we would love to hear from you!

We are growing the AI capability within our Product team and are looking for a Senior AI Engineer to join us in London.

This is an applied, experimental role that sits inside the Product team rather than a central engineering function. You will work directly with Product Managers to understand the problems our customers face, shape those problems into candidate AI solutions, and prove or disprove them quickly through prototypes, experiments and rigorous evaluation. What works, you carry through to production-ready code, with the tests, evals and documentation our engineering teams need to take it on and run it at scale.

You will work across LLM-based applications, agentic systems and retrieval over structured and unstructured maritime data, primarily on Azure and Databricks, and you will help set how the AI team builds, evaluates and hands over AI at RightShip. A large part of the job is working out what is worth building, so you should be comfortable with ambiguity and confident recommending that an approach is dropped when the evidence says so. 

Major Responsibilities

• Work directly with Product Managers to gather and refine requirements, and translate them into candidate AI solutions with clear success criteria and evaluation plans.
• Rapidly prototype and experiment with LLM-based applications, agents and retrieval pipelines to establish whether an idea works before it is committed to the roadmap.
• Propose and document solution architectures, covering model choice, orchestration, data access, guardrails, and cost and latency trade-offs.
• Design and build AI evaluation suites, offline and online, that define what good looks like for each feature and can be run in production to monitor quality over time.
• Produce production-ready code with tests, evals, documentation and observability, hand it over to the engineering teams for productionisation, and support them through that transition.
• Build and maintain retrieval and embedding pipelines over maritime data such as inspection reports, vessel records, documents and the RightShip knowledge graph.
• Apply Responsible AI practice: traceability, guardrails, assessment of failure modes and bias, and alignment with RightShip's AI risk management framework.
• Present experimental results and recommendations clearly to product, engineering and senior stakeholders.
• Contribute to the AI team's shared tooling, patterns and standards; review code and share knowledge with colleagues.
• Keep abreast of developments in models, agent frameworks and evaluation methods, and assess which are worth adopting.

Qualifications, Skills & Experience

Essential

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on AI/ML or software engineering experience, including LLM-based applications that have reached production.
• Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals: testing, packaging, version control, code review and CI.
• Demonstrated experience building agentic systems and RAG pipelines with LangGraph (and LangChain or similar), including tool use, state management and structured outputs.
• Experience designing and running LLM evaluations: building evaluation datasets, choosing metrics, LLM-as-judge, regression testing and monitoring quality in production.
• Practical knowledge of embeddings, vector search and hybrid retrieval.
• Experience deploying AI workloads on Azure, for example Azure OpenAI / AI Foundry, Azure AI Search and Functions or Container Apps.
• Comfortable working in an experimental setting where requirements are loosely defined and part of the job is working out what to build.
• Excellent communication skills, including explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical colleagues.

Desirable

• Experience with Databricks (MLflow, Delta Lake, model serving).
• Solid ML fundamentals; exposure to PyTorch or classical ML is useful but not central to this role.
• Experience with multi-modal models, particularly document and image understanding.
• Familiarity with graph databases (Neo4j, Cypher) or knowledge graphs.
• Experience in maritime, shipping, logistics or another safety- or compliance-driven domain.
• Open-source contributions or a public portfolio of work.

RightShip is an Equal Opportunity Employer and values diversity, enables access and promotes inclusion in our workplace. You must have the right to live and work in this location to apply for this job.