Lead Applied AI Engineer

Why loveholidays? We’re on a mission to open the world to everyone, giving our customers unlimited choice, unmatched ease and unmissable value for their next getaway. Our trailblaze together culture is what drives our success, powered by our people and the way they work. Using progressive technology, we drive cutting-edge innovation and improve how our customers discover, book and experience their holidays. You’ll have the opportunity to accelerate your growth through meaningful challenges, new experiences and the freedom to shape your own path. You’ll create impact for our future by taking ownership, contributing to shared goals and helping shape what comes next, all as part of our enhanced international community of talented, collaborative and passionate teams.   The difference you’ll make You’ll lead the Applied AI team within the wider AI Centre of Excellence, setting technical direction and managing the engineers who build, administer and improve the AI-enabled systems and SaaS platforms that support our customers and colleagues. You’ll work closely with business verticals, engineering, security and senior stakeholders to turn business priorities into a clear roadmap and measurable outcomes. You’ll combine people management with hands-on technical leadership across applied and agentic AI workflows, SaaS services, integrations and data pipelines. You’ll guide architecture and delivery, develop the team’s capabilities and own relationships with third-party SaaS suppliers, ensuring our platforms are reliable, secure and deliver value for money. The team sits within Business IT & AI Operations. You’ll provide the direction, governance and operational ownership that help loveholidays scale intelligent automation and well-run business systems safely and effectively, balancing new opportunities with service quality, cost and long-term maintainability. Your day-to-day: • Lead and line-manage Applied AI engineers, setting clear goals, providing regular feedback and coaching, supporting career development and managing performance. Help recruit and onboard new team members as the team grows. • Set the team’s technical direction and delivery roadmap with business and technology stakeholders, prioritising work, allocating capacity and managing dependencies to deliver measurable business outcomes. • Provide hands-on technical leadership for applied and agentic AI workflows, integrations and automation pipelines, guiding architecture, reviewing designs and code, and contributing to complex or high-impact engineering work. • Set standards for building, testing and evaluating tool-using agents with Google ADK or similar frameworks, including safe tool access, human oversight and production readiness. • Own operational performance across AI-enabled services and SaaS platforms, including service health, access, releases, usage and cost. Lead incident escalation and continuous improvement, with clear evaluation criteria and service measures. • Own account management for third-party SaaS suppliers, acting as the primary relationship owner and running regular service and roadmap reviews. Hold suppliers accountable for agreed service levels, resolve escalations and coordinate their delivery with internal priorities. • Manage the supplier and contract lifecycle with procurement, finance, legal and security, covering selection, onboarding, licensing, commercial negotiations, contractual obligations, renewals, notice dates and exit planning. Own spend management for the team’s SaaS and AI services, working with finance to forecast and manage costs against agreed budgets, explain variances and optimise licences and consumption. Track adoption, spend and value, and inform build-versus-buy decisions. • Establish engineering and operational stand