Applied AI Engineer

The Role: Applied AI Engineer

Contract Length: 6 Months

Rate: up to £750

Hybrid

You must already have active SC Clearance to be considered for this role

I am working with a key government client to find a Lead Applied AI Engineer to drive the development of cutting-edge digital services that are simpler, clearer and faster — to meet real user needs. You will play a central role in the AI Customer Experience Frontier programme, an ambitious new initiative shaping the future of how people interact with public services. This work will harness the latest AI capabilities to radically improve the customer experience across government.

As a Lead applied AI Engineer you’ll:

• Ideating and developing one or more AI projects. These could be fully-fledged internal applications the incubator is building. Alternatively, they might be services we’re building for the government's biggest missions in collaboration with other departments, where we work closely with technical counterparts.
• Writing and reviewing code daily.
• Ensuring that the members of your technical team are delivering to the best of their ability, ensuring continued investment in the project and in their own skills.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams and senior stakeholders to quickly understand customer needs and translate them into pragmatic technical solutions leveraging AI.
• Leading the design and establishment of frameworks, tools and processes to responsibly develop, deploy and monitor AI products.
• Evangelising best practices in applied AI across government.
• Highly focussed on solving problems and identifying the critical path to impact.
• Staying on top of the latest developments in AI, including new models and paradigms.

Who you are:

• Proficiency in Python.
• Strong software engineering skills with a focus on building production-ready systems
• An understanding of deploying and monitoring such systems in a cloud environment.
• Familiarity with tools for working with Large Language Models via API or in a local context (e.g. HuggingFace transformers).
• Experience with natural language processing, deep learning and generative AI.
• Passion for building products that augment human capabilities and improves citizens’ lives.
• Have a humble attitude and an eagerness to help others with empathy
• Working in dynamic environments and navigating ambiguity, prioritising ruthlessly where necessary
• Experience of any of the following would be beneficial but not essential:
• Building AI agents, or products that rely on AI agents
• Developing and working with tools and interfaces for AI applications (e.g. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol)
• Training traditional Machine Learning and Deep Learning models
• Experience delivering applications to production
• Hands-on experience with containerisation technologies such as Docker.
• Experience designing software services with respect to infrastructure, considering dependencies like databases and message queues, cloud environments, and pre-existing services with which yours must collaborate.
• Supporting and enabling technical teams via upskilling, mentoring and conflict resolution.
• Owning outcomes end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done to ensure your team succeeds
• Explaining complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences with clarity
• Proven ability to collaborate with “non-engineering” disciplines, such as design and user research, to plan and deliver work of provable value as part of a product team, including prioritising, breaking down and sequencing technical work to achieve the best possible outcomes.
• experience of a variety of methods to enable you to very quickly become a subject matter expert in the areas you are assigned to investigate