Staff / Principal Applied AI Researcher (Agentic Search)

Responsibilities

We are representing a confidential AI infrastructure organization seeking a Staff or Principal Applied AI Researcher to join their team building an agentic search platform in London. This is the web access layer for AI systems—think of it as search designed for machines, not humans.

In this role, you will own key parts of applied AI research direction and system design, defining new approaches and shipping measurable impact in production. You'll be designing how AI agents retrieve, evaluate, and reason over web data in real time under strict latency and reliability constraints.

Your responsibilities include:

• Drive applied research and technical direction across retrieval and ranking systems
• Design and evolve multi-stage retrieval architectures including query understanding, rewriting, reranking, and iterative retrieval
• Develop methods for grounding LLMs in real-time web data at scale
• Define and implement new evaluation paradigms and metrics for agentic systems, where correctness is not reducible to clicks
• Lead experimentation on modern retrieval approaches (embeddings, hybrid search, reranking) and bring them into production
• Analyze trade-offs across relevance, latency, and cost at scale
• Work closely with engineering to deploy systems in high-throughput, low-latency environments
• Own ambiguous problems end-to-end and contribute to product and research direction
• Mentor engineers and help raise the technical bar of the team

What We're Looking For

Must-haves:

• 8+ years of experience in applied AI, ML, or software engineering
• Proven track record of shipping ML or AI systems to production at scale
• Deep experience with search, retrieval, ranking, recommendation systems, or assistants
• Strong understanding of modern deep learning, especially transformers and embeddings
• Experience with LLM-integrated or knowledge-intensive systems
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks and metrics for ML systems
• Strong programming skills in Python and at least one of Go, C++, or similar
• Ability to operate in a fast-moving, product-driven environment with high ownership and autonomy

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with large-scale search or recommendation systems
• Background in agentic AI systems (agents, tool use, autonomous workflows)
• Experience with RAG, multi-step retrieval, or tool use
• Publications, open source, or similar signals of technical depth and impact

How We Work with You

Our talent team at Get A Job.ai partners with innovative organizations to connect exceptional candidates with career-defining opportunities. Here's our process:

• Apply directly through the Get A Job.ai platform
• A dedicated recruiter will screen your application and conduct an initial conversation
• We'll prepare and submit your profile to our client for consideration
• Please do not contact the client directly—we'll manage all communications and coordinate next steps on your behalf

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process and are competitive for this senior-level role in the London market.

Equal Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to inclusive recruiting practices. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and work to ensure fair and equitable treatment throughout the hiring process.