Lead Applied AI Engineer

Location: London Workplace: Hybrid Why loveholidays? We’re on a mission to open the world to everyone, giving our customers unlimited choice, unmatched ease and unmissable value for their next getaway. Our trailblaze together culture is what drives our success, powered by our people and the way they work. Using progressive technology, we drive cutting-edge innovation and improve how our customers discover, book and experience their holidays. You’ll have the opportunity to accelerate your growth through meaningful challenges, new experiences and the freedom to shape your own path. You’ll create impact for our future by taking ownership, contributing to shared goals and helping shape what comes next, all as part of our enhanced international community of talented, collaborative and passionate teams.   The difference you’ll make You’ll lead the Applied AI team within the wider AI Centre of Excellence, setting technical direction and managing the engineers who build, administer and improve the AI-enabled systems and SaaS platforms that support our customers and colleagues. You’ll work closely with business verticals, engineering, security and senior stakeholders to turn business priorities into a clear roadmap and measurable outcomes. You’ll combine people management with hands-on technical leadership across applied and agentic AI workflows, SaaS services, integrations and data pipelines. You’ll guide architecture and delivery, develop the team’s capabilities and own relationships with third-party SaaS suppliers, ensuring our platforms are reliable, secure and deliver value for money. The team sits within Business IT & AI Operations. You’ll provide the direction, governance and operational ownership that help loveholidays scale intelligent automation and well-run business systems safely and effectively, balancing new opportunities with service quality, cost and long-term maintainability. Your day-to-day: - Lead and line-manage Applied AI engineers, setting clear goals, providing regular feedback and coaching, supporting career development and managing performance. Help recruit and onboard new team members as the team grows. - Set the team’s technical direction and delivery roadmap with business and technology stakeholders, prioritising work, allocating capacity and managing dependencies to deliver measurable business outcomes. - Provide hands-on technical leadership for applied and agentic AI workflows, integrations and automation pipelines, guiding architecture, reviewing designs and code, and contributing to complex or high-impact engineering work. - Set standards for building, testing and evaluating tool-using agents with Google ADK or similar frameworks, including safe tool access, human oversight and production readiness. - Own operational performance across AI-enabled services and SaaS platforms, including service health, access, releases, usage and cost. Lead incident escalation and continuous improvement, with clear evaluation criteria and service measures. - Own account management for third-party SaaS suppliers, acting as the primary relationship owner and running regular service and roadmap reviews. Hold suppliers accountable for agreed service levels, resolve escalations and coordinate their delivery with internal priorities. - Manage the supplier and contract lifecycle with procurement, finance, legal and security, covering selection, onboarding, licensing, commercial negotiations, contractual obligations, renewals, notice dates and exit planning. Own spend management for the team’s SaaS and AI services, working with finance to forecast and manage costs against agreed budgets, explain variances and optimise licences and consumption. Track adoption, spend and value, and inform build-versus-buy decisions. - Establish engineering and operational standards for secure change management, documentation, runbooks and governance. Communicate progress, risks and trade-offs clearly, and ensure services have clear ownership and support arrangements. Your skillset: - People & Delivery Leadership: Experience line-managing engineers, coaching and developing people, managing performance and leading delivery. Able to set direction, prioritise competing demands and build a collaborative, accountable team. - SaaS Supplier & Account Management: Experience owning third-party supplier relationships, service reviews, escalations, licensing and renewals. Commercial judgement and the ability to work with procurement, finance, legal and security to improve service quality and value for money. - SaaS Platform Ownership: Experience leading the administration and lifecycle management of cloud-based business systems, including configuration, user access, environments, integrations and releases. - Applied AI & Technical Direction: Strong experience delivering applied and agentic AI workflows that combine models, tools and business data, including orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation. Able to make architecture and build-versus-buy decisions, establish engineering standards and guide others. Familiarity with Google ADK or similar frameworks is desirable. - Engineering & Integration: Strong hands-on engineering skills and experience designing and reviewing REST API, webhook and event-driven or scheduled integrations between SaaS platforms, AI services and backend systems. - Operational & Stakeholder Leadership: Experience operating production services in cloud environments, preferably Google Cloud Platform, using CI/CD, observability, incident management and secure operational practices. Able to explain technical and commercial trade-offs, influence stakeholders and connect delivery to business outcomes. The interview journey - Intro with a member of the Talent Acquisition team - 30 mins - 1st stage video interview with the hiring manager - 1 hour - Applied AI technical leadership, team management and SaaS supplier management task - Final stage with Director of Applied AI and senior stakeholders - 1 hour Perks of joining us: - Company pension contributions at 5% - Individualised training budget for you to learn on the job and level yourself up - Discounted holidays for you, your family and friends - 25 days of holidays per annum (plus 8 public holidays) increases by 1 day for every second year of service, up to a maximum 30 days per annum - Ability to buy and sell annual leave - Cycle to work scheme, season ticket loan and eye care vouchers   Our commitment to inclusion At loveholidays, we focus on creating an inclusive environment where everyone can contribute, grow and succeed. We value the different perspectives, experiences and ideas each person brings, because they help us work better together, challenge our thinking and make stronger decisions. As we continue to grow and evolve, we want everyone to feel supported and able to do their best work. We’re also committed to making our hiring process accessible, so please let our Talent Acquisition team know if you need any adjustments at any stage.