Senior AI Engineer (Defence)

Description

The company is one of the UK's leading AI and data businesses, with over a decade of delivering production-grade AI for government, healthcare, defence and commercial clients.

Microsoft and AWS work with the company to build advanced AI and data systems used at citizen scale.

The AI and Data Practice has 150 people covering machine learning, generative AI, agentic AI and data, and it helped write the UK government's AI Cyber Security Code of Practice implementation guide.

The team focuses on deploying AI responsibly, securely and with measurable business value, and it is expanding its AI capability.

Responsibilities

• Build advanced AI solutions using current machine learning, generative AI and agentic AI methods.
• Introduce modern AI frameworks, AIOps practices and scalable cloud-native architectures across the team.
• Work hands-on in delivery and with customers, turning business problems into AI solutions people can trust.
• Make responsible AI practices part of every stage of the work.
• Mentor engineers and junior developers, helping them learn and solve hard problems.
• Make sound, well-reasoned decisions in a quick-moving environment, while picking up new technologies and approaches.

Requirements

• A minimum 2.1 degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, Statistics or a similar quantitative subject.
• Proven experience putting modern AI or ML systems into production, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), model evaluation, and monitoring with metrics such as precision, recall, NDCG and drift detection.
• Strong Python skills and sound software engineering habits such as CI/CD, testing and code review.
• Experience building large-scale solutions on Azure and AWS, using containers with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Expertise in data engineering for AI, handling large volumes of unstructured and multimodal data.
• Understanding of responsible AI, model interpretability and ethical considerations.
• Strong interpersonal skills and a good record of working in teams.
• Active SC Clearance.
• Desirable: Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, fine-tuning or distilling LLMs such as GPT, Llama, Claude or Gemini, and machine learning libraries such as scikit-learn or XGBoost.
• Desirable: Experience with AI data storage, vector databases, semantic search and knowledge graphs.
• Desirable: Contributions to open-source AI projects or research publications.
• Desirable: Familiarity with AI security, privacy and compliance standards such as ISO42001.
• Desirable: Experience in the defence sector.

Conditions

The company welcomes applicants from all backgrounds and treats every candidate equally, and it will arrange adjustments on request through a private conversation with the talent team.