Lead AI Engineer_Cloud DevOps, Python, Gen AI

Staff AI Engineer

Our AI Acceleration organisation builds AI-powered applications that deliver real business value at speed. As a Staff AI Engineer working within a business-aligned AI Tiger Team, you'll design, build, and deploy solutions end-to-end, working directly alongside the business teams who need them. This is a role for engineers who want to solve real problems from the ground-up, working in partnership with our senior business customers.

Critically, this role requires far more than technical expertise. You will work directly with senior customers across high-impact business teams executives, traders, analysts, and functional leaders who are shaping the strategic direction of the organisation. Success in this role depends on your ability to build trusted, enduring partnerships with these stacustomersistening deeply to understand their challenges and requirements, translating complex technical possibilities into clear business outcomes, and operating as a credible, consultative partner rather than simply a technical resource. The gravitas and eye for business to engage confidently at senior levels is crucial.

This is not a role with large supporting teams, or narrowly defined responsibilities. You will be expected to operate independently, often as a team of one, wearing multiple hats across the full delivery lifecycle. On any given engagement, you may need to act as product manager, data scientist, AI engineer, and DevOps engineer. We need resourceful, self-sufficient professionals who can be dropped into ambiguous situations and deliver outcomes with minimal support.

If you want to solve real business problems, prefer ownership over handoffs, and do your best work when you're embedded with the people who need the solution - we'd like to hear from you.

Job Responsibilities

• Operate autonomously across the full solution lifecycle - owning product definition, technical architecture, build, deployment, and operations - without relying on dedicated supporting teams or extensive oversight.
• Lead multi-functional initiatives embedded directly within senior business teams, working alongside executives and functional leaders to rapidly build and deploy AI solutions that address their highest-priority strategic challenges.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to senior customers: proactively engaging to understand their business context, actively listening to uncover underlying needs, and translating requirements into actionable solutions.
• Make pragmatic technical decisions on approach (e.g., when to apply traditional ML vs. generative AI, build vs. buy, speed vs. robustness) based on business context and constraints.
• Lead architectural decisions, bringing guidelines in software development lifecycle, explain-ability, and responsible AI.
• Design, develop, and maintain production-grade AI applications and services using modern software engineering practices (CI/CD, testing, observability, cloud-native design).
• Evaluate and integrate existing AI tools, frameworks, and APIs (e.g., LLMs, vector DBs, retrieval-augmented generation) into robust applications.
• Stay ahead of with emerging AI technologies but prioritize practical application and delivery over experimental research.
• Contribute to the internal knowledge base, tooling libraries, and documentation to scale engineering practices across the organisation.
• Mentor other engineers and data scientists and provide technical leadership across projects, helping improve for rigor and impact.

Job Qualifications

Required:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience; ability to independently design and ship complex systems in production.
• Strong programming skills in Python (preferred), Java, or similar languages, with experience in developing microservices, APIs, and backend systems.
• Proven understanding of software architecture, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP), and modern DevOps practices.
• Experience integrating machine learning models into production systems (e.g., LLMs via APIs, fine-tuning, RAG patterns, embeddings, agents and crew of agents etc.).
• Experience with large language models (LLMs), vector-based search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or unstructured data processing.
• Ability to move quickly while maintaining code quality, test coverage, and operational excellence.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a bias for action, with the ability to navigate ambiguity and lead through complexity.
• Strong experience with technical mentorship and cross-team influence.
• Ability to translate complex sophisticated ideas into clear business insights and communicate functional partners.
• Demonstrate Provennce as an embedded or forward-deployed engineer where you operated as a strategic partner to senior business leaders, with direct accountability for delivering outcomes - not just a technical contributor.
• Exceptional listening skills and the ability to ask incisive questions that uncover true business needs beyond surface-level requests.
• Professional gravitas and executive presence: the confidence and credibility to engage, influence, and build lasting relationships with senior leaders across the organisation.
• Proven ability to work independently with minimal supervision, taking full ownership of delivery from concept through to production deployment.
• Versatility to operate across multiple disciplines: you must be comfortable stepping into product management, data science, engineering, and DevOps responsibilities as the situation demands - not as a specialist in each, but with sufficient competence to deliver end-to-end.
• Hands-on experience deploying complete solutions to cloud platforms (Azure or AWS), including infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD pipelines, and production operations.
• Strong judgement on technical trade-offs: knowing when to apply traditional ML versus Generative AI, when to build versus integrate existing tools, and when to prioritize speed versus robustness.

Preferred:

• Experience with agentic development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex and similar tools.
• Familiarity with AI/ML tools such as LangChain, Haystack, Hugging Face, Weaviate, or similar ecosystems.
• Experience using GenAI frameworks such as LlamaIndex, Crew AI, AutoGen, or similar agentic/LLM orchestration toolkits.
• Experience building reusable modeling components or chipping in to internal ML platforms.
• Proficiency in Python and common ML/data science libraries (e.g., scikit-learn, pandas, NumPy, PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Solid knowledge of machine learning fundamentals, including supervised and unsupervised learning, model evaluation, and statistical inference.
• Exposure to working with unstructured data (documents, conversations, images) and transforming it into usable structured formats.
• Experience building chatbots, search systems, or generative AI interfaces.
• Background in working within platform engineering or internal developer tools teams.

About bp

Our purpose is to deliver energy to the world, today and tomorrow. For over 100 years, bp has focused on discovering, developing, and producing oil and gas in the nations where we operate. We are one of the few companies globally that can provide governments and customers with an integrated energy offering. Delivering our strategy sustainably is fundamental to achieving our ambition to be a net zero company by 2050 or sooner!

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

Additional Information

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Even though the job is advertised as full time, please contact the hiring manager or the recruiter as flexible working arrangements may be considered.

What you can expect from us!

Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion:

At bp, you could be part of Business Resource Groups (BRGs) which belief in the power of inclusion, deeper connections, and shared experiences. They provide a place for employees to learn and share knowledge, to connect, and to improve. The BRGs focus on and encourage talent engagement, development, and retention while creating a broadened sense of community and inclusion for bp employees. The groups cultivate leadership growth by involving employees in developmental opportunities they would not otherwise have access to. Formal and informal mentoring also helps employees develop their professional goals and connect with colleagues. The BRGs dedication to growth at all levels helps employees feel more engaged and energized. The BRGs break down barriers, so we can all do better together. Examples of BRGs include (but are not limited to):

bpWIN (bp Womens International Network)
Pride Working parents PEN (Positively Ethnic Network) bpInclusia (bp’s Asian community) bpEnerga (bp’s Latin community)