Graduate AI Engineer - Leeds
Graduate AI engineer joining FDM Group's Agentic Engineering CoE, embedded in a client squad under Forward Deployed Consultants. Day-to-day: translating business problems into specs, building agentic/LLM/RAG features, evaluating AI output against defined criteria, and applying governance and FinOps practices.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Leeds
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Junior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Ai engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's degree in AI, Software or Computer Science disciplines
- Demonstrable AI engineering portfolio (personal projects, hackathons, open-source or coursework with real builds)
- Confidence to make and defend technical judgement calls, including challenging AI-generated answers
- Understanding of programming fundamentals and object-oriented concepts
- Informed view on how the software engineer's role is shifting toward specifying and evaluating AI-written code
- Strong communication skills for both engineers and business stakeholders
- Comfortable working in a squad, taking direction and contributing across build, evaluation and delivery
Nice to have
- Experience with Python or another modern language, including AI coding assistants (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor)
- Exposure to agentic frameworks, specification-driven development, or evaluation and testing tooling
- Understanding of software development lifecycles and Agile delivery
- Familiarity with version control (Git), cloud platforms or APIs
- Awareness of AI governance, safety or risk concepts
- Experience from academic projects, internships, bootcamps or personal builds
Full description
- Deadline: Ongoing
- Salary: Competitive
- Location: Leeds
- Degree required: Bachelor's
- Disciplines: AI, Software, Computer Science
About Us
FDM is an award-winning global leader in tech and business talent solutions, backed by more than 35 years of industry experience. We have centres across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific, and a global workforce of over 2500 employees. FDM has shown exponential growth throughout the years, firmly establishing itself as an award-winning employer, currently listed on the FTSE4Good Index and as a 2026 Financial Times UK ‘Best Employer’.
About The Role
Software engineering has moved up the stack. AI now writes a growing share of the code; the harder, more valuable work is specifying what to build, judging whether it's right, and getting it trusted into production. This programme is built for that shift.
You will join our Agentic Engineering and Build Capability CoE as part of a client squad, working alongside senior engineers and Forward Deployed Consultants on real problems: agentic systems, AI-enabled products, and the evaluation and governance that make them safe to ship.
We are not training you to write code AI can already write; we are training you to do what AI cannot: understand the problem, specify it precisely, evaluate the output, and defend your reasoning to engineers and the business alike.
We are looking for graduates who can already show us this in practice. If you have built something with AI (a side project, a hackathon entry, an automation that actually runs), bring it: we will spend more time on what you built and why than on your degree.
Key Responsibilities
- Work inside a client squad, contributing to agentic and software engineering builds under the direction of a Forward Deployed Consultant or senior engineer.
- Translate business problems into clear, testable specifications: the discipline that increasingly separates good engineers from AI that writes syntactically correct but wrong code.
- Build and integrate AI-powered features using Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic workflows.
- Evaluate AI-generated and AI-assisted output against defined success criteria, using evaluation harnesses and golden datasets rather than judgement alone.
- Apply security, governance and cost-awareness principles, including AI FinOps thinking, so what you build is reliable, scalable and safe to run.
- Work directly with product owners and business stakeholders to understand what "done" actually means, not just what was asked for.