Artificial Intelligence
Engineering in the UK
I'm Brandon Allen, an independent artificial intelligence engineer working with organisations across the United Kingdom. I design, build and operate production AI systems: private LLM deployments on your own hardware, rigorous evaluation pipelines, and the engineering discipline that separates a working demonstration from a dependable system.
Engineering AI systems to a production standard
Artificial intelligence engineering is not prompt-writing. It is systems work: serving language models within real latency and memory budgets, constructing training and fine-tuning pipelines whose results are reproducible, and instrumenting every stage so that performance claims are measured rather than asserted.
My practice covers the full stack: model serving on llama.cpp and vLLM, quantization and GPU optimisation, QLoRA fine-tuning with held-out evaluation, retrieval-augmented pipelines with citation grounding, and the web applications that put these systems in front of users. Each layer is built to be observable, testable and handed over.
The distinguishing specialism is private, on-prem AI: systems engineered to run entirely on your own infrastructure. For UK organisations in regulated or confidential domains (legal, healthcare, finance, defence-adjacent engineering) this is frequently the difference between AI being adoptable and being a compliance risk.
AI engineering services across the UK
Stack
Python · PyTorch · llama.cpp / vLLM · CUDA · QLoRA fine-tuning · evaluation harnesses · RAG / vector search · TypeScript · Next.js · Docker · Linux
Frequently Asked Questions
What distinguishes AI engineering from AI consultancy?
Consultancy produces recommendations; engineering produces systems. I do both, but the emphasis is on delivery: architectures that are implemented, measured against held-out benchmarks, deployed on your infrastructure and documented for handover. Every claim about model quality or latency is backed by an evaluation you can re-run.
Do you work with organisations outside Plymouth?
Yes, the practice is UK-wide. I am based in Plymouth and work on-site across Devon and Cornwall, and remotely with organisations throughout the United Kingdom. Engagements are project-based or contract.
Can AI systems run entirely on our own infrastructure?
Yes, and this is my core specialism. Open-weight models served on your own GPUs or private cloud mean no data leaves your environment and no dependency on third-party API pricing or availability. I handle the quantization, serving and optimisation required to make that practical on real hardware budgets.
How is quality assured?
Through evaluation-first engineering: held-out benchmark suites, statistical comparison against baselines, regression gates before deployment and observability after it. If a fine-tune or architecture change does not measurably improve the system, it does not ship.
