Senior AI Technical Advisor - Part-time - UK/EU

About Skillfluence

Skillfluence is a UK-based innovation and training company working with universities, researchers, and entrepreneurship programmes across the UK. We are developing an AI-enabled platform to scale and enhance programme delivery across two business verticals: Higher Education and Entrepreneurship.
This role supports a Scottish Enterprise Innovation Fund-backed R&D project to develop AI-assisted applicant assessment, cohort and mentor matching, and two programme-aware participant support agents (focus and emphasis on the latter).

The role

We are looking for a Senior AI Technical Advisor/Consultant to work alongside our internal technical lead on an advisory basis. You will not be building the platform. You will be guiding the person who does, making the architectural decisions that prevent costly mistakes, and actively upskilling our team so they can carry the work forward independently.

This is a strategic role for someone who has built agentic AI agent systems before and can steer someone else through doing it well.

Responsibilities

• Advise on AI architecture decisions across two participant-facing AI agents
• Recommend platforms, tooling, frameworks, and integration approaches
• Provide oversight on RAG design, agent orchestration, and hallucination control
• Support the upskilling of our internal technical lead through regular working sessions
• Guide governance, evaluation, and validation approaches appropriate to a regulated funding environment
• Help frame technical work in a way that supports R&D defensibility for grant reporting

Required experience

• Hands-on delivery experience with LLM-based systems (Claude, OpenAI, or similar)
• Proven track record building RAG pipelines and AI agents in production
• Experience with agentic AI architectures and multi-step reasoning systems
• Strong communication and mentoring skills - you will be actively teaching, not just advising
• UK timezone availability for regular working sessions

Useful but not essential

• Experience in education, public sector, or grant-funded programme environments
• Familiarity with UK GDPR and AI governance considerations
• Prior involvement in fractional or advisory engagements

Engagement structure

The engagement is structured as a retainer over approximately 12 months, with roughly 30 days of advisory time across the project. Time is expected to be heavier at the architecture and setup phases, lighter during delivery, and reactive around key decision points.

Start date is contingent on Scottish Enterprise grant approval, but we expect the project to kick off in circa 4 weeks.