Lead AI Engineer

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Black Piano is a UK-headquartered staffing business, set up in 2020 by Jonathan McElhatton and Abhishek Maurya. We help ambitious small-medium sized businesses around the world to build effective remote teams in India. 

We are growing quickly as more and more businesses embrace remote working and are experiencing increased cost pressure from rising salary expectations and tax burdens in countries like the UK. Our India-based internal team source, screen, hire, onboard and manage all HR processes for around 100 Indian staff, which we expect to rise to around 200 staff in the next six months. Our UK team manages all sales, marketing and account management activity. 

But the world is changing, fast. AI is both opportunity and threat to our business. Today, we are a 100% human-resource staffing business. Tomorrow, we want to be something more. We believe the best services companies of the next decade will combine excellent people with excellent AI — and we want Black Piano to be one of them. We have built a strategy. We need someone to take this forward and lead in implementation. 

ROLE OVERVIEW

Most companies will spend the next year talking about AI. We want to spend it shipping.

This role has two halves, and they reinforce each other.

Half one — help us build what we sell next. You will partner with the CEO to evolve Black Piano's proposition from 100% human staffing to a portfolio that includes AI-augmented and AI-native services.Think hybrid human-plus-AI delivery teams, agentic services that clients can buy directly, and entirely new offerings we have not built yet. The work you do internally becomes the proof, the playbook, and in many cases the product.

Half two — transform how we run. You will own the internal AI roadmap end-to-end. Recruitment, finance, HR, sales, marketing, operations — every function is in scope. You will pick the highest-leverage problems, design the agents and workflows that solve them, ship them into production, and watch the hours come back to the business.

If you are the kind of engineer who builds late at night because you cannot help yourself, who has opinions about prompt design and agent evaluation, who reads the new model release notes the day they drop — we want to hear from you. This is the role you have been waiting for an ambitious company to create.

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES

Proposition & strategy

• Partner with the CEO to evolve Black Piano's proposition from 100% human staffing to a portfolio that includes AI-augmented and AI-native services.
• Translate what we learn building internally into productised propositions — hybrid human-plus-AI delivery teams, agentic services, and new offerings clients can buy directly.
• Prototype client-facing AI solutions, run pilots with friendly clients, and help shape pricing and packaging.
• Stay close to the frontier — track new models, frameworks, and competitor moves, and translate them into options the CEO can act on.
• Bring colleagues along on the journey — explain what the AI does, what it doesn't, and what to do when it gets something wrong.
• Measure and report concrete outcomes — hours saved, errors reduced, revenue influenced — directly to the CEO.

Internal automation

• Audit our internal processes across recruitment, finance, HR, sales, marketing, and operations, and identify the highest-leverage automation opportunities.
• Design, build, and deploy AI agents and automated workflows that complete real operational work end-to-end — not chatbots, not toys, real production systems.
• Automate sales and marketing workflows: lead generation, prospect research, outbound sequencing, CRM hygiene, content drafting, SEO, social media, and marketing analytics.
• Automate recruitment, finance, HR, and operations workflows: candidate sourcing and screening, document processing, reporting, reconciliations, onboarding, and the long tail of repetitive internal admin.
• Integrate AI with the systems we already use — ATS, HRIS, CRM, accounting, communications, and document management tools.
• Build internal tools that let non-technical teammates use AI safely and effectively, with the right guardrails.
• Set up evaluation, monitoring, escalation paths, and data privacy controls so the automations we ship are trustworthy.

EXPERIENCE & KEY SKILLS

The most important requirement in this role is your character. We’re looking for someone hungry, ambitious, driven and committed. Someone who wants to prove themselves and take on a career role. The opportunity for the right individual in the role is limitless.

Other requirements include:

• 5-10 years of relevant experience, with at least 2 years building AI or automation systems that have run in production.
• You have shipped real AI agents — not just demos. You have wrestled with prompt design, tool use, retrieval, evaluation, latency, cost, and the awkward edge cases that only show up in production.
• Strong Python skills. Comfort with TypeScript or Node.js is a plus.
• Confident with API integrations, webhooks, and orchestration tools.
• A genuinely pro-AI mindset. You believe AI changes what one person can deliver, and you want to prove it. You are excited about agentic systems and you keep up with what's new each week.
• Excellent spoken and written English — you will work directly with UK leadership and be a key voice in cross-team conversations.
• Strong product sense. You can sit with a recruiter or a marketer or an accountant, understand their workflow, and turn that into a system that actually helps them.
• Bias to ship. You would rather put a v1 in front of users this week than a perfect system in three months.

Nice-to-have requirements include: 

• Experience in staffing, BPO, or another people-heavy services business.
• Previous experience automating sales, marketing, finance, recruitment, or HR workflows.
• Familiarity with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation.
• Experience designing agent evaluation and observability.
• Open-source contributions or visible side projects in the AI space — show us what you have built.

TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES

A non-exhaustive view of the stack we expect to lean on. We are deliberately tool-agnostic — you will help us choose what fits each job.

• LLMs: Claude (Anthropic), OpenAI (GPT-4 / GPT-5 family), and selectively open-weight models where it makes sense.
• Agent frameworks: Claude Agent SDK, LangChain / LangGraph, and similar.
• Workflow orchestration: n8n, Make, Zapier — whichever fits the job.
• Languages: Python (primary), TypeScript / Node.js.
• Data & retrieval: SQL, Pandas, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, or pgvector).
• Sales & marketing tooling: HubSpot / Salesforce, Apollo / Clay, LinkedIn outreach tools, marketing analytics, and content/SEO platforms.
• Voice & document AI: Whisper, ElevenLabs, OCR and document-parsing tooling.
• Integration: REST APIs, webhooks, Slack / Teams, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365.
• Source control: Git / GitHub.

WHAT WE OFFER

• A high-impact, high-visibility role reporting directly to the CEO.
• Real ownership — you will set the AI roadmap and ship to production from week one.
• Direct exposure to UK leadership and to our clients.
• Budget for tools, models, conferences, and training. We genuinely want you to keep learning.
• A team that wants to see your work, celebrate your wins, and back you when something doesn't go to plan.