The posting
Succeed by shaping what matters
We’re BDO, one of the UK’s largest accountancy and business advisory organisations, helping ambitious businesses, their owners and management teams navigate a changing world.
With circa 8,500 people across the UK and Ireland, backed by a global network spanning 169 countries, there’s lots of knowledge, experience and different thinking to draw on here. But what matters is what you bring to it; your ideas, perspectives - the things you care about getting right.
So, here’s where you come in:
The team you’ll join
At BDO, our Consulting practice brings together different areas of expertise to help organisations solve complex problems and make better decisions. We work across the mid-market, public sector and large enterprises, supporting clients through growth, change and new challenges.
Our multidisciplinary approach means we can bring together the right people and perspectives for the problem in front of us, whether that’s helping an organisation grow, become more resilient or work differently.
We work as one community of consultants, sharing our expertise and learning from each other as we go. Whether we’re working with scale-ups or global institutions, our approach is consistent: we listen, we challenge, and we work with our clients to find a way forward.
The role you’ll have
An AI specialist at Manager level in our Digital team part of Consulting and focused on designing, building and deploying AI solutions. This role is ideal for someone with strong hands-on engineering skills and experience leading AI delivery within consulting or project environments. We are looking for an individual who can translate business requirements into working AI applications, combining generative AI, machine learning, data engineering and system integration as appropriate. The role spans technical discovery and architecture through development, evaluation, deployment and ongoing improvement, with an emphasis on reliable solutions that deliver measurable business value. Alongside hands-on delivery, the role includes ownership of project outcomes, client relationships and team development, supported by strong problem-solving skills and a practical, commercially aware approach.
Responsibilities
- Lead technical discovery and solution design, translating business needs into prioritised AI use cases, architectures, delivery plans and measurable acceptance criteria.
- Design and build AI applications, including generative AI assistants, retrieval-augmented generation, agent-based workflows and machine learning solutions, selecting approaches that fit the problem rather than the technology.
- Develop the data pipelines, APIs and integrations needed to connect AI solutions to client systems, and lead deployment using sound software engineering, version control and automated delivery practices.
- Define and implement evaluation, testing and monitoring for accuracy, reliability, security, latency and cost, embedding access controls, human oversight and appropriate responsible AI safeguards.
- Manage project scope, budgets, resources, dependencies and technical risks, working with clients and multidisciplinary teams to take solutions from prototype to production, handover and ongoing improvement.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership, coach team members and review code and solution designs, while contributing to proposals, delivery estimates and reusable AI components and delivery approaches.
You'll be someone with
- Practical experience building generative AI applications using large language models, prompt design, embeddings, vector search and retrieval-augmented generation, with an understanding of agent-based workflows and their limitations.
- Hands-on experience developing LLM and generative AI applications using frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph or equivalent orchestration frameworks, including retrieval-augmented generation and agentic workflows.
- Practical experience with enterprise AI platforms such as Microsoft Foundry (Azure AI Foundry), Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock or equivalent cloud AI services, taking solutions from experimentation through to production deployment.
- Strong understanding of traditional machine learning alongside generative AI, with practical experience in supervised and unsupervised learning and algorithms/frameworks such as XGBoost, scikit-learn or equivalent.
- Experience implementing RAG architectures using embeddings, vector databases/search technologies and enterprise data sources, with an understanding of retrieval quality, chunking, grounding and relevance.
- Experience designing and implementing evaluation frameworks for AI solutions, including model/LLM quality, accuracy, groundedness, hallucination, latency, token consumption and cost, together with appropriate monitoring in production.
- Strong AI engineering fundamentals including Python, APIs, containerisation, Git, automated testing and CI/CD, with experience integrating AI applications into enterprise systems and data platforms.
- Experience evaluating and monitoring AI outputs, using representative test datasets and clear performance criteria, with practical understanding of machine learning principles, model limitations, privacy, security and responsible AI controls.
- Experience managing AI or software delivery engagements and teams, taking ownership of scope, budgets, resources, timelines, technical risks and delivery quality.
Experience providing hands-on technical leadership, coaching developers and data specialists, reviewing code and architecture, and contributing to proposals, delivery estimates and reusable technical assets.
You’ll have people around you to learn from, ask questions and share thoughts with, alongside learning programmes to enhance your skillset and digital platforms to ease your work. All of this helps you succeed in achieving those big (and personal) dreams.
How you’ll succeed
You’ll have plenty of ways to develop at BDO; you might build deeper expertise in what you already do, take on something new or simply get better at the things that matter to you.
How and where you work matters too. Our agile working framework is designed around our Better Together approach: bringing more in-person time with clients and teams, creating more opportunities to share ideas, build confidence and develop day-to-day.
Whatever success looks like to you, you won’t be shaping it alone. You’ll have people around you who want you to do well, and plenty of opportunities to make it all count.
That’s how we’ll all continue to succeed by shaping what matters.
Apply now.
At BDO, we want everyone to feel included, valued and able to succeed. We welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to improving access to opportunities – work we've been recognised for as Company of the Year at the 2026 British Diversity Awards. Because we know different experiences and perspectives make us stronger.
