Specialist - Engineering/AI

The Specialist - AI / .NET is a senior technical authority within the engineering organisation, responsible for designing, developing, and delivering high‑quality software solutions that power Davies’ UK&I technology estate. The role provides hands‑on technical leadership across modern engineering practices, cloud‑native architectures, and Agile delivery environments, ensuring that engineering squads consistently deliver robust, scalable, secure, and maintainable software. Acting as a role model for engineering excellence, the Specialist - AI / .NET mentors developers at all levels, promotes best practice, and drives continuous improvement in code quality, patterns, tooling, and development workflows. The role is responsible for solving complex technical problems, setting engineering direction, and collaborating with cross‑functional teams to ensure solutions meet strategic and operational objectives. This role is ideal for a highly skilled, T‑shaped engineer with deep specialism in one or more areas (back‑end, front‑end, cloud, DevOps) and broad exposure across the modern Microsoft‑centric stack including .NET, C#, React/TypeScript, Azure, Terraform, and SQL Server. Lead a cross-functional generative AI-focused software development team. Integrate LLM APIs into existing platforms to enhance user interactions, decision-making and automation capabilities. Enhance applications with agentic AI capabilities to enable autonomous decision-making and improve business workflows. Work collaboratively across product, data science and engineering teams to develop AI-driven features and optimise system performance. Utilise generative AI tools, including coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot, to accelerate development processes. Deploy and manage applications on cloud platforms, ensuring scalability, security and reliability. Stay current with advancements in LLMs, generative AI and cloud technologies, and apply relevant innovations to improve platform capability and performance. Lead the design and development of high‑quality, cloud‑native applications aligned to strategic technologies. Write clean, maintainable, secure code following SOLID principles, design patterns, and OWASP guidelines. Develop microservices, containerised applications, and event‑driven components. Implement automated testing approaches including TDD, integration testing, and CI/CD pipeline automation. Support SRE (site reliability engineering) practices such as observability, resilience engineering, and performance tuning. Work closely with Architects, Product Owners, Platform Engineers, and QA teams to ensure alignment between technical solutions and business goals. Liaise with 3rd‑party software partners throughout design, build, support, and maintenance cycles. Participate in Agile ceremonies, contributing to planning, refinement, retrospectives, and continuous improvement. Encourage user‑centred design, working with UX/UI colleagues to ensure intuitive, high‑quality user experiences.