Senior AI and Data Engineer

About BKL

BKL is a Top 40 accountancy and advisory business supporting a diverse client base, from entrepreneurs and high-net-worth individuals to ambitious owner-managed businesses and multinational groups. With a legacy spanning over 130 years, we’ve evolved into a modern, purpose-driven business that balances profit with impact.

We are proud to be a certified B Corp, reflecting our commitment to sustainability, transparency, and responsible governance. As a member of DFK International, we support clients locally and internationally with cutting-edge expertise and a personal touch.

We believe all clients deserve the same level of care, innovation, and excellence.

About the Team

You’ll be joining our Strategy and Transformation Team, working at the heart of BKL’s AI capability. The team works closely with senior leadership, operational stakeholders and colleagues across service lines, supporting them with technology delivery, strategic change, and digital transformation. We’re collaborative, innovative and outcome-focused, offering exposure to firm-wide transformation initiatives and the opportunity to help shape our evolving data and AI capabilities.

A Message from the Hiring Manager

We’re looking for a hands-on and versatile Data & AI engineer who’s excited to ship production AI systems in a professional services firm. You’ll work closely with senior stakeholders to scope opportunities to use AI and then partner with teams to develop point solutions for these. The solutions will range in nature from intelligent document processing to agentic workflows that augment our advisors and drive real productivity. If you’re pragmatic, curious, and motivated by impact, we’d love to hear from you.

Your Opportunity

This is a hands-on senior engineering role building the AI systems that power BKL’s transformation. You’ll own the design and delivery of AI enabled workflows, and LLM-powered applications used across the firm. With real ownership, senior visibility, and scope to shape our technical direction, this is an opportunity to do your best work on meaningful problems.

How You’ll Make a Difference

In this role, you will:

• Design, build, and deploy production-grade data and AI systems, from ingestion and transformation pipelines through to the AI applications that run on them.

• Build and maintain reliable data pipelines and lakehouse infrastructure that serve both analytics and AI workloads across the firm.

• Own technical decisions across the stack – from data modelling and pipeline design to retrieval, evaluation, and deployment patterns.

• Build robust evaluation frameworks to measure and improve system quality over time.

• Scope new opportunities and gather requirements with business teams. capturing and prioritising requirements and defining what good looks like before building.

• Partner closely with teams across the firm as a trusted advisor, running discovery to understand how they work, analysing their processes and pain points, and shaping and scoping point solutions together that deliver measurable business value.

• Contribute to our engineering standards, mentoring others and raising the bar on code quality, testing, and operational excellence.

• Stay close to the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem and bring relevant innovations into our work.

You’ll Be Ideal for This Role If You Have:

Required Skills & Experience:

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of developing production-grade systems.

• Strong expertise in Python and SQL.

• Solid understanding of data engineering foundations – orchestrating ETL/ELT pipelines, data modelling, and working with large datasets in a lakehouse/warehouse setting.

• A genuinely collaborative, business-facing approach — comfortable acting as the bridge between business and technology: running discovery with non-technical teams, gathering and analysing requirements, and translating business problems into scoped, high-impact AI solutions together.

• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications, with strong underlying skills (prompt engineering, structured outputs, tool use, and evaluation)

• Experience building agentic workflows or retrieval-augmented (RAG) applications.

• Strong CI/CD and production deployment discipline – testing, observability, versioning, and safe rollout.

• Experience with Databricks (Unity Catalog, Delta, PySpark) or equivalent lakehouse platforms.

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or related STEM field.

Desired Skills & Experience:

• Experience building on Microsoft or Azure AI platforms (such as Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio, or the Power Platform), or the appetite to get up to speed quickly.
• Familiarity with agent and tool-integration patterns – function and tool calling, connecting agents to enterprise data and systems, and protocols such as MCP.
• Comfort working across multiple LLM providers and selecting the right model for a given task.
• Experience delivering user-facing tools within enterprise environments such as Microsoft 365, Teams, or the web.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tooling in day-to-day development.
• Background in professional services, consultancy, or another regulated or advisory environment.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders.

We know you have a lot to offer, which is why we give you the freedom to thrive, no matter who you are or what your background is.