Senior Manager, Forward Deployed AI Engineer

About Baringa
Baringa is a global consulting firm that partners with leaders to drive change and create value. With deep industry expertise, and enabled by advanced technology, the firm helps clients to deliver with greater confidence and certainty. With over 2,000 people across the UK, Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, the firm combines global insight with local understanding.

Our Solutions & AI Labs (SAIL) practice is looking for an experienced Senior Manager to lead consultancy engagements and grow our AI & Solutions Engineering capability. The Forward Deployed AI & Solutions Engineer role will lead the delivery of AI-enabled solutions embedded in our clients' teams, combining deep technical specialism with the commercial and leadership skills to grow and shape our practice. This is a role for someone who thrives at the intersection of client advisory, technical architecture and hands-on delivery leadership, and who has a passion for bringing AI solutions to production at scale.

What you will be doing
As a Senior Manager in SAIL, you will own and lead consultancy engagements end-to-end from shaping the opportunity and winning the work, through to delivery governance and team leadership. You will bring SME-level depth in at least one of AI/ML Engineering, Platform Engineering, or Software Engineering.

Engagement Leadership:

• Own and lead end-to-end delivery of complex AI and technology consulting engagements, taking accountability for scope, quality, risk and client outcomes.
• Lead and resource multi-disciplinary delivery teams including engineers, data scientists and consultants providing clear direction, technical oversight and people development.
• Manage engagement resourcing: forecast team requirements, staff engagements, and develop the talent pipeline through mentoring.
• Proactively identify and manage delivery risks in complex stakeholder environments.
• Conduct rigorous technical reviews and uphold engineering and delivery standards.

Business Development & Bid Support:

• Play a leading role in business development: identifying new opportunities, shaping propositions, and supporting or leading bids and tender responses.
• Contribute to proposal writing, authoring technical and delivery sections of bid responses to client tenders and RFPs.
• Build and maintain strong client relationships, acting as a trusted advisor.

Technical Architecture & Delivery:

• Lead architecture design for AI-enabled platforms and cloud solutions.
• Provide hands-on technical direction where required, reviewing designs, code and delivery artefacts.
• Champion the path from prototype to production: driving robust, scalable and secure AI deployments.

AI/ML Specialism (expert-level in at least one, working knowledge across the others):

• Agentic AI & LLM Engineering: Design and build production-grade agentic systems using major LLM SDKs and agent frameworks; deep knowledge of RAG, MCP servers and prompt engineering at scale. Strong opinions on secure, resilient enterprise deployment of LLM-powered systems.
• Machine Learning Engineering: End-to-end ML lifecycle expertise including feature engineering, model training, evaluation and production deployment, MLOps, monitoring and drift detection. Practical knowledge of ML frameworks (scikit-learn, PyTorch, XGBoost) and cloud-native ML services (SageMaker, Azure ML, Vertex AI).
• Platform & Cloud Engineering: Architecture and delivery of scalable cloud data and AI platforms on AWS, Azure or GCP; containerisation, IaC, event-driven architectures and CI/CD.
• Software Engineering: Production-grade Python services (FastAPI, AWS Lambda, event-driven patterns) and front-end development with React/Next.js. Cloud architecture design across major providers; strong engineering practices including CI/CD, testing and release management.

Your Skills and Experience

• 7+ years in technology consulting, software engineering or AI/ML, with at least 3 years in a senior leadership role including direct accountability for end-to-end engagement delivery, resourcing and commercial outcomes.
• Experience supporting or leading bid and proposal activity, including writing technical and delivery sections of responses to client tenders and RFPs.
• SME-level depth in at least one of: Agentic AI/LLM Engineering, Machine Learning Engineering, Platform & Cloud Engineering, or Software Engineering.
• Proven ability to build and lead high-performing delivery teams, engaging comfortably at CTO or engineering director level.
• Clear, confident communicator.
• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Data Science or related discipline, or equivalent professional certifications (e.g. AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Google Professional ML Engineer).
• Desirable: prior experience as a forward-deployed or embedded engineer within a client environment; exposure to regulated industries such as energy, financial services or public sector.