Lead AI Engineer

Description

The company is a newly formed group created by combining Intralot and Bally's International Interactive. It is a leading iGaming operator and a major global lottery solutions provider.

The group works across online gaming, lottery, iLottery and sports betting, where technology, regulation and entertainment meet. It is well placed to benefit from global growth in digital play and wider regulation of lottery and iGaming markets.

This is a founding leadership role for a new AI Engineering function. The function has two parts under one team: R&D that tests what is possible in personalisation, recommendation, search and agents, and a delivery group that puts working features into the live product for real players.

You will add people around an existing AI R&D group, lead its technical work, develop its engineers and stay close to the code. The work covers the lobby and discovery experience and the content pipelines behind it, including recommendation, contextual bandits, dynamic categorisation, advanced search, agents and automatic content generation.

This is a hands-on leadership job. You set the technical standard and the approach, manage and develop the team, and have enough depth to make difficult calls that the team trusts.

Responsibilities

• Direct the technical work of the AI R&D programme: choose how problems are approached, which technical and architectural bets to make, and how each capability is proven across personalisation, recommendation, search and agents.
• Lead one team covering both R&D and delivery. Manage and grow the engineers, remove their blockers, and answer for both proving ideas and shipping them.
• Define the production standard for AI features from start to finish, including how experimental work becomes hardened, observable and maintainable without losing its innovative edge.
• Work on the hardest problems yourself, challenge technical bets, and stay credible in the code without personally delivering every feature.
• Take validated prototypes to live traffic for real-time personalisation, recommendation, search and ranking, meeting real latency budgets and reliability needs.
• Set a high bar on AWS and TypeScript, covering CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, testing and LLMOps for model-backed systems in production.
• Plan delivery against the roadmap with the VP, product managers, data analysts and Staff Engineers. Build capability that can be reused across brands instead of rebuilt for each one.
• Work within Responsible Gambling and UKGC requirements in a regulated, real-money, real-time setting.

Requirements

• Substantial commercial software engineering experience, including leading technical teams or engineering functions.
• Deep skill in TypeScript and Python, and a record of putting AI, machine learning or data-driven systems into production, such as recommendation engines, intelligent search, ranking systems or LLM-powered applications.
• Extensive experience building and running cloud-native applications on AWS, with strong knowledge of CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability and modern engineering practice.
• Experience building high-performance, real-time systems that stay reliable at scale under strict latency requirements.
• Proven experience moving AI work from research or proof of concept into robust, production-ready services.
• Experience setting technical standards, raising engineering quality, and mentoring or developing engineers in strong teams.
• You enjoy building and developing engineering teams and creating conditions where new ideas can grow.
• You balance experimentation with engineering discipline and make technical decisions that hold up over time.
• You lead technical discussions confidently, shape architecture and make complex decisions with many stakeholders.
• You care about building AI systems that are scalable, maintainable and observable, using current engineering best practice.
• You communicate clearly and work well across engineering, product, data and leadership.
• You stay hands-on with technology while giving strategic technical direction.

Conditions

Equal opportunity: the company does not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, age, sex or sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion or belief, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, political opinion or disability.

Benefits

• 25 days of annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Health insurance.
• Volunteering days.
• Home office allowance.
• Wellness or gym allowance.
• Flexi-block policy that lets you work abroad for up to four weeks a year.