Azure AI Engineer

We’re Pentland Brands: a global family business behind some of the world’s most iconic active and lifestyle brands. We bring integrity, energy and ambition to our work, setting high standards and striving to deliver great outcomes without ego.

Design cycling apparel built for movement, endurance and the ride ahead.

At Pentland Brands, every role helps move our brands forward. Whether you’re supporting our people, improving our systems, growing our commercial performance, strengthening operations or shaping better ways of working, your impact reaches across a portfolio of iconic brands used by consumers around the world.

As our Azure AI Engineer, you'll partner with our brands globally and key functional areas to deliver technology that enables the business to realise its vision and strategy. You will work with our data platforms and tools to provide information that improves and enhances decision-making across the business.

What you’ll be doing:

• Design, develop, deploy and enhance production-grade AI solutions, including intelligent agents, generative AI applications and machine learning pipelines that solve real business problems at scale.

• Own the ongoing enhancement and operational support of AI agent solutions, including defect resolution, deployments, known limitations, backlog items and future improvements.

• Provide BAU support and enhancement delivery for production APIs on Azure, covering incident investigation, root-cause analysis, code or configuration changes, testing and deployment coordination.

• Provide Azure platform operational support across App Service, Azure SQL Database, Storage Accounts, managed identities, application settings, and related configuration and access requests.

• Administer and support Azure SFTP, including user and directory creation and maintenance, permissions, approved access changes, and connectivity or path troubleshooting.

• Support deployment and release processes, including environment configuration, pre-checks, post-deployment validation, rollback, and production support coordination.

• Monitor application and platform health using App Service logs and Application Insights; perform structured root-cause analysis and implement corrective and preventive actions for recurring issues.

• Apply strong software engineering practices and collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders and dependent teams to translate requirements into reliable, maintainable solutions and measurable outcomes.

What you’ll bring:

Experience: 1–3 years of relevant experience in AI/ML engineering, Azure application development, or a closely related role.

Must-have capabilities:

• Strong proficiency in Python for AI/ML development, scripting, API development and automation, plus development experience with .NET and C# in the Azure ecosystem.

• Solid command of SQL for data extraction, transformation, analysis and pipeline support.

• Hands-on experience building applications with large language models, including prompt engineering, RAG architectures, embeddings and fine-tuning.

• Experience with at least one agent-building framework such as Google ADK, LangChain or LangGraph, including tool use, memory management and multi-step agent orchestration.

• Working experience with Azure deployment, compute, storage and cloud-native AI/ML services.

• Practical knowledge of building and training models using TensorFlow, PyTorch or Scikit-learn.

Preferred capabilities:

• Experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, ChromaDB, Qdrant or FAISS for similarity search and RAG pipelines.

• Familiarity with MLOps and CI/CD tools such as MLflow, Kubeflow or Weights & Biases for experiment tracking, model versioning and deployment automation.

• Working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for packaging and orchestrating AI workloads.

• Experience building and exposing AI services through REST or gRPC APIs using FastAPI, Flask or similar frameworks.

• Familiarity with Apache Airflow, Prefect or equivalent workflow orchestration tools.

• Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows.

• Strong analytical thinking, clear communication, the ability to work independently and across teams, and a proactive problem-solving mindset.

Why Pentland Brands?

Pentland Brands is the name behind some of the world’s best-known sport, outdoor and lifestyle brands, including Speedo, Berghaus, Canterbury, Endura, Ellesse, Kickers and Mitre.

We are a global family business with a clear purpose: pioneering brands that make life better. Across our teams, functions and locations, we work together to create products, experiences and partnerships that help people live more active, confident and positive lives.

Joining Pentland Brands means becoming part of a business where your work can have real reach, across multiple brands, markets, teams and disciplines. It is a place for people who want to contribute, collaborate, improve how things are done and help build the future of brands with heritage, ambition and global impact.

Perks & Benefits

Alongside a competitive salary and discretionary bonus, we offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your wellbeing, flexibility, and life outside work. This includes generous holiday allowance, hybrid and flexible working, employee transportation, pension and gratuity contributions, wellbeing support, medical, personal accident & term life insurance cover.

You can find full details of our benefits and perks on our UK Benefits page.

The Interview Process

We want our interview process to feel clear, straightforward, and supportive. If your experience and expectations look like a strong match for the role, here’s what you can expect next:

1. Talent Team Intro Call - A 30-minute video call with our Talent Team to get to know each other, talk through the role and your experience, and answer any questions you have.

2. Experience Interview - A more in-depth interview (usually online) with the hiring manager to explore your skills, experience and approach, and how these align with the role, our principles, and our ways of working.

3. Final Interview - A final in-person interview at our office, focused on deeper discussion and practical application, giving you the chance to meet more of the team and see Pentland Brands in action.