Demand is sharp and concentrated. Demand for AI skills increased nearly 200 percent in a year, with London accounting for 80 percent of AI-related job postings and nearly two-thirds of all technology vacancies in the UK The Register (Accenture data). That tells you two things: the roles are new, and the competition for the people who can fill them is fierce.
The wider engineering picture is tight too. 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). When you add a specialist layer like daily agent testing on top, the pool narrows further.
Entry-level supply is thinning as well. In engineering, entry-level hiring has fallen to -19% while senior hiring sits at -10%, a 9-percentage-point gap GOV.UK - A snapshot of entry-level hiring in the UK. So the junior people you might train into these roles are harder to find than the seniors you want to lead them.
The people you need sit between software engineering, machine learning and quality assurance. They write code, but their day job is watching what an agent actually does, logging where it drifts, and feeding that back into the system. On site matters here because live agent behaviour is best observed next to the teams and data that produce it.
Retention is the dynamic to plan for. 79% of UK technical professionals plan to change employers in 2026, according to recruitment firm Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report surveying over 500 employers and 1000 candidates Engineering and Technology Jobs (IET) / Rise Technical. If four in five of the market is open to moving, your offer and your onboarding need to be ready today, not next quarter.
Your sourcing is mostly domestic. For the engineering profession, the vast majority of new hires come from the resident labour force, indicating low reliance on international recruitment GOV.UK - Professionals in IT and engineering. So building a strong UK pipeline, rather than waiting on visas, is where the practical gains are.
Screen for habits, not just titles. Ask people to walk you through a time an agent or model gave a plausible but wrong answer, how they caught it, and what they changed. The strongest people describe their own testing routine: what they check daily, which edge cases they watch, and how they log failures so others can reproduce them.
Set a short, realistic exercise. Give them a sample of agent output with a few errors seeded in and see what they flag and what they miss. That reveals more than a whiteboard puzzle, because the job is spotting quiet failures under real conditions.
Finally, write the role honestly. Say it involves daily, hands-on testing of live agent output on site, so the people who enjoy that work self-select in and the ones who want pure research self-select out.
We search 15 million candidates and manage the process end to end, from a ranked shortlist to a booked interview, so you spend your time with the right people instead of sifting. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost. Tell us what good agent testing looks like for your team, and Reed.ai will start shortlisting today.
