Prompt Engineer (IT)

Prompt Engineer 6 Month contract initially Based: Hybrid. Max of 3 days p/w onsite in either London, Tunbridge wells, Ipswich or Bolton Rate: £550 - £600 p/d - (via Umbrella company) We have a great opportunity with a world leading organisation where you will be provided with all of the support and development to succeed. A progressive organisation where you can really make a difference. We have a number of great opportunities for a Prompt Engineer to join the team. As a Prompt Engineer, you will design, implement, and optimize conversational and generative AI experiences powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) on Microsoft Azure. You will craft robust prompt strategies (system prompts, few-/zero-shot prompts, tool-use instructions), implement prompt chaining for multi-step reasoning, and integrate model outputs into enterprise applications via secure APIs. You will collaborate closely with product owners, solution architects, data engineers, and application developers to translate business objectives into high?quality AI outcomes. A working understanding of Retrieval?Augmented Generation (RAG) is essential to ground model responses in authoritative enterprise content and to reduce hallucinations. This role blends hands?on engineering with rigorous experimentation, evaluation, and continuous improvement. Your Responsibilities:

• Author, test, and refine system, developer, and user prompts to achieve reliable, safe, and consistent outputs.
• Implement prompt chaining and multi?turn orchestration patterns for complex workflows (reasoning, planning, tool use, and validation).
• Build LLM-powered features on Azure (e.g., Azure OpenAI, Azure Functions).
• Utilize and manage RESTful APIs/SDKs to integrate model calls within web services, back-end jobs, and enterprise applications.
• Design and implement RAG pipelines (chunking, embeddings, indexing, ranking/citation policies) to ground responses in approved content stores.
• Establish offline/online evaluation frameworks (accuracy, safety, faithfulness, latency, cost), create test datasets, and run A/B or canary experiments.
• Monitor production behaviour, analyze conversations, and iterate on prompts and retrieval strategies to improve outcomes.
• Enforce content safety, PII handling, data privacy, and role?based access; follow Responsible AI practices and organizational guardrails.
• Partner with architects and engineers to define LLM interfaces, token/cost budgets, and observability.

Key Skills/knowledge/experience:

• Hands?on experience crafting prompts (system role design, few-/zero-shot, tool-use instructions) and prompt chaining for multi?step tasks.
• Strong understanding of LLM behaviour (context windows, tokens, temperature/top?p, function/tool calling, safety filters).
• Understanding Prompt Injection and other security aspects of AI.
• Practical experience deploying LLM solutions on Azure (e.g., Azure OpenAI, Azure Functions, App Service, Key Vault).
• Proficiency with REST APIs and JSON; integrating LLM calls into applications/services using Python or C# (Node.js also acceptable).
• Working knowledge of embeddings, document chunking strategies, indexing, semantic search, and citation/grounding techniques.
• Experience with vector databases (e.g., Azure Cosmos DB vector search, Redis Enterprise, Pinecone) and reranking strategies.
• Experience with Git and CI/CD (Azure DevOps or GitHub), unit/integration testing for LLM pipelines, and environment/config management.
• Ability to measure and optimize latency, throughput, and cost (token budgeting, caching, retries, and fallbacks).
• Exposure to conversation design, guardrail UX, human?in?the?loop review workflows, and prompt libraries/pattern catalogues.

This is an excellent opportunity on a great project of work, If you are looking for your next exciting opportunity, apply now for your CV to reach me directly, we will respond as soon as possible. LA International is a HMG approved ICT Recruitment and Project Solutions Consultancy, operating globally from the largest single site in the UK as an IT Consultancy or as an Employment Business & Agency depending upon the precise nature of the work, for security cleared jobs or non-clearance vacancies, LA International welcome applications from all sections of the community and from people with diverse experience and backgrounds. Award Winning LA International, winner of the Recruiter Awards for Excellence, Best IT Recruitment Company, Best Public Sector Recruitment Company and overall Gold Award winner, has now secured the most prestigious business award that any business can receive, The Queens Award for Enterprise: International Trade, for the second consecutive period.