About the job
Location: Hybrid in central London (3 days onsite per week)
Contract Type: Contract
Role overview
minderacraft seeks a Senior Python Engineer to support the scaling and enhancement of the AI Stylist, a live AI-powered recommendation system for web and mobile users. As the product enters a rapid growth phase, the team faces a substantial backlog of features and improvements. This contract role sits within the Recommendations team, focusing on integrating advanced AI capabilities and blending conversational interfaces with recommendation logic. The work directly affects the quality, relevance, and reliability of a customer-facing system in production.
What you will do
- Develop and refine AI-driven services using Python
- Design and implement evaluation frameworks for large language model (LLM) systems
- Enhance output quality through structured evaluations, beyond just code changes
- Apply techniques such as LLM-as-a-Judge to assess recommendations and responses
- Manage and iterate on non-deterministic systems, using real-world performance data
- Integrate AI features into a broader platform and API ecosystem
- Contribute to production readiness, focusing on reliability, observability, and performance metrics
- Collaborate closely with data scientists on prompt engineering, model selection, and evaluation strategies
Requirements
Core experience
- Strong Python engineering background in production environments
- Experience building AI-enabled applications, especially recommendation or conversational systems
- Direct experience with evaluation frameworks for LLM or AI systems
- Understanding of how AI systems differ from traditional deterministic software
- Ability to design effective evaluations and drive ongoing system improvement
- Track record of collaborating in cross-functional teams with engineering, data, and product stakeholders
Nice to have
- Familiarity with Azure AI services or similar platforms
- Knowledge of OpenAI or comparable SDKs
- Exposure to infrastructure and distributed systems
- Experience with tools like Terraform or Kafka
Benefits
- Competitive day rate

