Senior ML / AI Engineer

Job summary

At DSIT we’re all about improving people’s lives by maximising the potential of science & technology.

We accelerate innovation, investment and productivity through world-class science, research and development.

We use technology for good by ensuring new and existing technologies are safely developed and deployed across the UK, with the benefits more widely shared.

We are driving forward a modern digital government which gives citizens a more satisfying experience and their time back.

We do all this to enable the Government’s 5 national missions: kickstarting economic growth, making Britain a clean energy superpower, taking back our streets, breaking down barriers to opportunity and building an NHS fit for the future.

Above all, we focus on improving people’s lives. Whether it’s researching new treatments for disease, developing better batteries, reducing burdens through better public services, keeping children safe online, and much more, outcomes for citizens are at the heart of what we do.

Our Inclusive Environment

We offer flexible working benefits, employee well-being support and a great pension. We are enormously proud to be a Disability Confident Leader employer. We support candidates with adjustments throughout our recruitment process. Information about disability confidence and just some examples of the adjustments that you can request can be found in the reasonable adjustment section below.

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.

Find Out More

We regularly run events where you can find out more about the department and tips for the application and interview process. You can sign up for upcoming events here: https://forms.office.com/e/Jae3B4w7xm

You can also follow our LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/dsitcareers/

Job description

About the team

DSIT Data Science’s ML & AI team builds, deploys and improves production-grade products that are actively used by teams within the department and across government.

Our work is focused on real systems with real users. This includes AI-enabled products, machine learning services and pipelines, and supporting digital tools that underpin operational and analytical work. This is not a research or prototyping team: prototyping is handled elsewhere in the wider data science function. This team takes products into production, improves them over time, and ensures they remain reliable, maintainable and useful.

We work in a modern engineering environment with access to the tools needed to build well, including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and other LLM-assisted development tooling, with the ability to use these appropriately within our secure development workflows.

The role

We are looking for a Lead ML / AI Engineer to act as the technical lead for our Data Science ML & AI Engineering sub-team.

This is a hands-on technical role and does not involve line management. You will be expected to shape technical direction, make sound engineering decisions, help others improve, and remain close to the code.

Success in this role means not only being able to solve hard technical problems yourself, but also raising the standard of those around you. Hands-on coaching and pair programming are expected parts of the role. We want someone who can set technical direction, stay close to the implementation, and help less experienced engineers grow into strong contributors in production environments.

This role is about building and running production systems, not experimenting in isolation. We need someone who has designed, built, deployed and maintained systems that people genuinely rely on. That means experience of the full engineering lifecycle: architecture, implementation, testing, CI/CD, observability, release, support and continuous improvement.

Each sub-team is structured around two complementary leadership roles:

• a Project Lead- a data scientist who is primarily responsible for delivery, shaping the product, and managing junior colleagues while remaining technically credible.
  
• one or more Technical Leads- (this role) which is solely focused on technical leadership, engineering quality, and the long-term building and maintaining of products.

You will work closely with your Project Lead as a peer. The wider engineering team is made up of HEO and SEO engineers working in shared production codebases.

Current and expected areas of work

The major current product is SIFT: an AI-enabled product used to support the analysis of large volumes of unstructured text, helping teams process consultation and correspondence-style material more effectively and at scale. This product is currently used in five major Government departments and is at scale-up.

Over the coming year, we expect this role to contribute heavily to products and services such as:

• A semantic layer for the departmental data lake, using technologies such as MCP, LLMs and agents to allow non-technical users to interact more effectively with analytical data.
  
• A classification-as-a-service capability that combines ML-based and LLM-based classifiers to identify and classify data that feeds into analysis across all DSIT policy areas - which include current frontier technologies prioritised by government.

Person specification

You will:

• lead the technical design, build, maintenance and improvement of production-grade ML / AI products and services;
  
• take ownership of engineering quality across the products you support, including code quality, testing strategy, deployment approach, observability and operational resilience;
  
• make sound decisions on architecture, feasibility, trade-offs and technical direction;
  
• work closely with Project Leads and other peers to ensure products are both useful and technically sustainable;
  
• contribute directly to implementation in Python and related technologies, including reviewing code and shaping standards across the team;
  
• mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers through hands-on support, pair programming, technical review and day-to-day problem solving;
  
• help establish and spread strong engineering practices across the wider data science team;
  
• ensure that ML / AI systems are deployable, supportable and maintainable in production, rather than remaining as isolated notebooks or prototypes;
  
• contribute to the evolution of shared platform and service capabilities that can be reused across products;
  
• help the team make effective use of modern AI-assisted engineering tooling in a secure and pragmatic way.

Essential Criteria

We are looking for someone with strong technical depth and clear evidence of having built and operated real products in production.

You should be able to demonstrate the following:

• strong software engineering experience in Python;
  
• experience building digital products or services that have active users and ongoing operational responsibilities;
  
• experience productionising ML / AI systems rather than only developing models in isolation;
  
• experience designing and maintaining cloud-native systems, ideally on AWS;
  
• practical experience with services such as Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge, Cognito, Fargate and related AWS patterns;
  
• strong experience with infrastructure as code, ideally Terraform; this is non-negotiable for the team;
  
• experience with CI/CD pipelines and testing processes;
  
• experience with logging, monitoring, alerting and debugging live services;
  
• good understanding of API and service design, event-driven architectures, and secure engineering practices;
  
• familiarity with common ML / data tooling and libraries; no single framework is required, but you should be comfortable working across the practical ML stack;
  
• a strong coaching instinct: you should actively enjoy helping others improve, not just doing the hard parts yourself.

Desirable Criteria

An exceptional candidate would also be able to demonstrate the following:

• LLM-powered application development
  
• agentic systems, tool use, or MCP-style architectures
  
• semantic search, retrieval, classification, or other NLP-heavy production systems
  
• designing reusable ML / AI services for use by multiple teams
  
• working in multidisciplinary public sector teams where delivery, assurance and maintainability all matter

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Developing Self and Others
• Seeing the Big Picture

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Programming and build
• Applied maths, statistics and scientific practices
• Systems integration
• Communicating between the technical and the non-technical

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £54,415, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £15,764 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

Applications will be sifted on CV and Personal Statement.

Within your CV, please include any experience relevant to the role, using specific examples of your work and responsibilities. Please avoid generic statements. Where appropriate, highlight the technical skills, tools, and technologies you have used, and make clear how you applied them in practice.

In the event of a large number of applicants, applications will be sifted on the CV only.

Candidates who pass the initial sift may be progressed to a full sift, or progressed straight to assessment/interview.

The interview will consist of behaviour and technical questions.

Interviewees will be asked to deliver a presentation; further details will be provided nearer the time.

The link to the technical/professional competency framework that candidates will be assessed against, for their reference: https://ddat-capability-framework.service.gov.uk/role/machine-learning-engineer#senior-machine-learning-engineer

A reserve list of candidates may be kept for up to 12 months.

Further Information

Reasonable Adjustment

We are proud to be a disability confident leader and we welcome applications from disabled candidates and candidates with long-term conditions.

Information about the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) and some examples of adjustments that we offer to disabled candidates and candidates with long-term health conditions during our recruitment process can be found in our DSIT Candidate Guidance. A DSIT Plain Text Version of the guidance is also available.

We encourage candidates to discuss their adjustment needs by emailing the job contact which can be found under the contact point for applicants section.

If you are experiencing accessibility problems with any attachments on this advert, please contact the email address in the 'Contact point for applicants' section.

If successful and transferring from another Government Department a criminal record check may be carried out.

New entrants are expected to join on the minimum of the pay band.

A location based reserve list of successful candidates will be kept for 12 months. Should another role become available within that period you may be offered this position.

Candidates who meet the minimum benchmark may be placed on a Reserve List for consideration for similar roles, including those at a lower grade. Candidates who narrowly miss the benchmark and are not placed on the Reserve List may still be considered for an offer in a similar role at a lower grade.

Please note terms and conditions are attached. Please take time to read the document to determine how these may affect you.

Any move to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax Free Childcare; for further information visit the Childcare Choices website.

DSIT does not normally offer full home working (i.e. working at home); but we do offer a variety of flexible working options (including occasionally working from home).

DSIT cannot offer Visa sponsorship to candidates through this campaign. DSIT holds a Visa sponsorship licence but this can only be used for certain roles and this campaign does not qualify.

In order to process applications without delay, we will be sending a Criminal Record Check to Disclosure and Barring Service/Disclosure Scotland on your behalf.

However, we recognise in exceptional circumstances some candidates will want to send their completed forms direct. If you will be doing this, please advise Government Recruitment Service of your intention by emailing Pre-EmploymentChecks.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk stating the job reference number in the subject heading.

For further information on the Disclosure Scotland confidential checking service telephone: the Disclosure Scotland Helpline on 0870 609 6006 and ask to speak to the operations manager in confidence, or email Info@disclosurescotland.co.uk

Applicants who are successful at interview will be, as part of pre-employment screening, subject to a check on the Internal Fraud Database (IFD). This check will provide information about employees who have been dismissed for fraud or dishonesty offences. This check also applies to employees who resign or otherwise leave before being dismissed for fraud or dishonesty had their employment continued. Any applicant’s details held on the IFD will be refused employment.

A candidate is not eligible to apply for a role within the Civil Service if the application is made within a 5 year period following a dismissal for carrying out internal fraud against government.

For further information on National Security Vetting please visit the Demystifying Vetting website.

Feedback

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).

See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.The Civil Service welcomes applications from people who have recently left prison or have an unspent conviction. Read more about prison leaver recruitment (opens in new window).Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : Sam Atkin
• Email : samuel.atkin@dsit.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : dsitresourcing.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk

Further information

Appointment to the Civil Service is governed by the Civil Service Commission’s Recruitment Principles. If you feel that your application has not been treated in accordance with the recruitment principles, and wish to make a complaint, then you should contact in the first instance dsitresourcing.GRS@cabinetoffice.gov.uk. If you are not satisfied with the response that you receive, then you can contact the Civil Service Commission. For further information on bringing a complaint to the Civil Service Commission please visit their web pages at: https://civilservicecommission.independent.gov.uk/contact-us/

Attachments

DSIT T&Cs v1.2 Opens in new window (docx, 179kB)