Animo Group

Roles we hire

AI Engineer Recruitment for the Sports Industry.

Specialist hiring for the engineers shipping production AI systems in sport - LLM-backed scouting tools, agentic workflows, broadcast AI, recommendation systems. People who can ship a model and ship a product.

The role

AI Engineering, but for Sport.

AI Engineering inside sport has emerged as its own discipline, distinct from both research and traditional software engineering. The role is about taking modern AI techniques - LLMs, retrieval, agentic patterns, computer vision - and putting them into production systems coaches, scouts and front offices actually use.

Typical work spans LLM-backed scouting copilots, agentic workflows for opposition prep, multimodal pipelines combining video, event data and biometrics, and the boring-but-critical work of deploying and monitoring them reliably.

The work is increasingly central to clubs, SportsTech vendors and broadcasters. So is the hiring competition.

What we look for

Builders. Shippers. Sport-Aware.

We assess every AI Engineer candidate against three pillars. Strong on all three is rare - and the only thing we hire for.

Technical depth
  • Production experience with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-weight)
  • Retrieval, embedding pipelines, vector databases
  • Agentic frameworks (AI SDK, LangGraph, custom orchestration)
  • Strong software engineering - TypeScript / Python / Rust
  • Familiarity with deploying and monitoring AI systems in prod
Sport-product instinct
  • Understanding of what coaches, scouts or analysts actually want from a tool
  • Comfort sitting alongside performance, recruitment or commercial teams
  • Past work shipping an AI feature inside a sport context (or strong adjacent product experience)
Engineering rigour
  • Eval-driven development - measuring system quality, not vibes
  • Strong API and system design
  • Comfort with incident response and on-call
The market

Brand New Role. Already Overheated.

AI Engineer hiring in sport barely existed two years ago. Today it's one of the most contested searches we run. SportsTech vendors are competing with clubs, with general-purpose AI companies and with adjacent industries - the talent pool is the same.

The people worth hiring are quietly building production AI systems somewhere. They're not on job boards. The fastest way to reach them is through the network they already trust.

Next step

Hiring or Hireable?

For hiring teams

You need an AI Engineer in sport.

Tell us about the product, the team you're building, what you've shipped, and what's been missing from previous shortlists.

For candidates

You build AI systems in sport.

If you're an AI Engineer working on sport - or thinking about a move into it - get in touch. No pressure, no spam.

Animo Group
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