Principal Consultant (AI/ML)
Posted 1 day ago by Areti Group | B Corp™
Negotiable
Outside
Hybrid
London Area, United Kingdom
Summary: A leading digital technology consultancy is seeking a Principal AI/ML Consultant to spearhead technical transformation in the financial services sector. This hands-on, client-facing role involves modernising legacy systems, driving AI adoption, and delivering measurable business value. The position requires a strategic leader with proven experience in managing technical teams and implementing AI solutions. The role is a 6-month contract based in London, with a hybrid working arrangement.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead the systematic modernisation of legacy services, prioritising based on business impact.
- Eliminate technical debt by extracting APIs, decommissioning obsolete services, and consolidating functionality.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to identify and deliver high-impact modernisation opportunities.
- Support platform services strategy by transforming legacy services into reusable, shared components.
- Drive adoption of AI tooling (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate development and modernisation.
- Create playbooks and replicable patterns for AI-enabled development and modernisation.
- Use LLMs and AI for service discovery, dependency mapping, code analysis, refactoring, and documentation.
- Demonstrate and quantify business value from AI adoption.
- Ensure modernised services are handed off with clear ownership and integrated into new workflows.
Key Skills:
- Proven experience leading technical teams and modernising complex legacy systems at scale.
- Strong architectural skills and ability to design logical abstractions for legacy code.
- Experience managing mixed teams of employees and contractors.
- Hands-on experience implementing AI/LLMs in software development workflows.
- Proficiency with modern AI development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot).
- Demonstrated ability to deliver measurable productivity improvements from AI adoption.
- Experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government) is highly desirable.
- Commercial awareness and ability to translate technical work into business outcomes.
- Pragmatic, delivery-focused mindset with a bias for action and incremental improvement.
Salary (Rate): undetermined
City: London
Country: United Kingdom
Working Arrangements: hybrid
IR35 Status: outside IR35
Seniority Level: undetermined
Industry: IT
Principal AI/ML Consultant (Contract)
Location: London (2 days per week on-site, remainder remote)
Contract: 6 months, Outside IR35
Start: ASAP
Overview
A leading digital technology consultancy is seeking a Principal AI/ML Consultant to lead strategic technical transformation within a financial services environment. This is a hands-on, client-facing role focused on modernising legacy systems, driving AI adoption, and delivering measurable business value.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the systematic modernisation of legacy services, prioritising based on business impact.
- Eliminate technical debt by extracting APIs, decommissioning obsolete services, and consolidating functionality.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to identify and deliver high-impact modernisation opportunities.
- Support platform services strategy by transforming legacy services into reusable, shared components.
- Drive adoption of AI tooling (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate development and modernisation.
- Create playbooks and replicable patterns for AI-enabled development and modernisation.
- Use LLMs and AI for service discovery, dependency mapping, code analysis, refactoring, and documentation.
- Demonstrate and quantify business value from AI adoption.
- Ensure modernised services are handed off with clear ownership and integrated into new workflows.
Skills & Experience
- Proven experience leading technical teams and modernising complex legacy systems at scale.
- Strong architectural skills and ability to design logical abstractions for legacy code.
- Experience managing mixed teams of employees and contractors.
- Hands-on experience implementing AI/LLMs in software development workflows.
- Proficiency with modern AI development tooling (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot).
- Demonstrated ability to deliver measurable productivity improvements from AI adoption.
- Experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government) is highly desirable.
- Commercial awareness and ability to translate technical work into business outcomes.
- Pragmatic, delivery-focused mindset with a bias for action and incremental improvement.
Desirable
- Knowledge of institutional trading requirements and B2B platform architecture.
- Background in platform engineering or developer productivity.
- Experience with federated open-source contribution models.