Lead AI Engineer Permanent

This role requires once in a week travel to Newcastle.

Scrumconnect Consulting is a multi-award-winning digital consultancy recognised for delivering impactful and innovative technology solutions across UK government departments. Our work has positively influenced the lives of over 40 million UK citizens. We are passionate about user-centred design agile delivery and building digital services that make a real difference and were now scaling that expertise into large high-stakes AI adoption programmes across the public sector.

Overview

Were looking for a Lead AI Engineer to be the hands-on technical builder at the core of a large-scale AI Operating Model programme for a central government department. Where the Lead Technical Architect sets direction you turn it into working production-grade systems semantic search RAG pipelines and broader generative AI capability integrated into complex legacy and multi-cloud environments handling high-volume sensitive public sector data.

Youll work inside a collaborative "Rainbow Team" alongside civil servants and the wider delivery team staying close to the code while also mentoring engineers and helping build the internal capability the department needs to eventually run these systems without long-term reliance on external suppliers.

Key ResponsibilitiesHands-On Build & Delivery Design build and ship production AI components RAG pipelines retrieval and embedding infrastructure orchestration logic and integration layers writing high-quality tested maintainable code and staying close to implementation rather than delegating it away.

Technical Leadership Within the Squad Lead the engineering practice within your delivery team: set coding standards review designs and pull requests unblock technically complex problems and mentor other engineers day to day.

Responsible AI in Practice Implement the guardrails the Architect designs bias mitigation checks evaluation harnesses human-in-the-loop review points so that Responsible AI principles (ATRS alignment NCSC "Secure by Design " meaningful human control) are enforced in the running system not just on paper.

Reliability Security & Observability Build AI services to be secure-by-default and observable in production: logging monitoring alerting and rollback paths appropriate for sensitive public-sector data and high-availability requirements.

Knowledge Transfer & Capability Uplift Work within the OKUA (Ownership Knowledge Understanding Awareness) framework and "Docs-as-Code" practices to pair with and upskill internal government engineers so capability genuinely transfers rather than staying locked in the consultancy team.

Efficient Sustainable Engineering Favour low-modality resource-efficient designs where they meet the need right-sizing models and infrastructure rather than defaulting to the largest/most expensive option in line with the programmes Green AI and Net Zero commitments.

Required Skills & Experience

Loosely mapped to the Government Digital and Data (DDaT) framework at Lead Engineer level:

Coding and Scripting (Expert) writing production-grade well-tested code; setting standards for others; comfortable owning components end-to-end.

Systems Design (Practitioner) designing components that integrate cleanly into a wider architect-defined system; understanding trade-offs across the stack.

Data Engineering (Practitioner) building reliable pipelines to ingest clean and prepare data (including unstructured/legacy sources) for AI consumption.

DevOps / Continuous Delivery (Practitioner) CI/CD pipelines infrastructure-as-code and automated deployment for AI workloads specifically (not just conventional web services).

Testing & Evaluation (Practitioner) beyond conventional unit/integration testing building evaluation harnesses for AI system quality: retrieval accuracy hallucination rate bias/fairness checks.

Problem Solving (Practitioner) diagnosing and resolving complex ambiguous technical issues under production pressure.

Agile Working (Practitioner) delivering iteratively within a blended multidisciplinary team including civil servants.

Given the scale of this programme direct hands-on depth across the AI engineering stack is essential:

Strong general-purpose programming (most commonly Python) applied to AI/ML systems

Semantic search vector/embedding infrastructure and RAG pipeline construction

LLM orchestration and agentic frameworks (e.g. LangChain/LlamaIndex-style tooling multi-agent patterns)

Prompt engineering and systematic evaluation/guardrail tooling (hallucination detection safety testing)

LLMOps/MLOps model versioning deployment monitoring and rollback for AI services in production

Cloud-native engineering across major providers (AWS Azure or GCP) including their AI/ML tooling

Containerisation and infrastructure-as-code for repeatable auditable deployments

Secure-by-design engineering appropriate to sensitive public-sector data

Desirable Experience

AWS / Azure / GCP certifications (associate or professional level)

Prior delivery of AI or digital services within UK central government or wider public sector

Experience fine-tuning or adapting open-source/foundation models for a specific domain

Open-source contributions or active engagement in AI/ML engineering communities

Experience designing for sustainability/Green IT commitments

The technological capabilities can span a wide range of AI and automation tools including Virtual Assistants Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Computer Vision Natural Language Processing (NLP) Machine Learning Deep Learning Generative AI Frontier LLMs and Predictive AI. A strong candidate would have experience/exposure to nuances of these tools/technologies.

Location and Working Pattern

Hybrid based from Newcastle upon Tyne with on-site attendance required for workshops knowledge-transfer sessions and onboarding. All production system and data access must be performed solely from within the UK.

How We Work

Our values:

Collaboration we are stronger as a team than as individuals; we tackle problems and celebrate wins together.

Create Value Early we find the quickest route from idea to product because our clients rely on us to do whats best.

Integrity teamwork requires trust; we can always be relied upon to uphold the highest standards.

Commitment no matter what no matter how we give our 100% to keeping our promises and achieving our goals.

Diversity and Inclusion we believe diversity drives innovation and better outcomes and were committed to an inclusive environment where every individual is valued respected and supported. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds including women people with disabilities and diverse communities as well as those seeking flexible working arrangements.

As a Disability Confident Level 1 employer we provide reasonable adjustments throughout recruitment and employment to ensure equal opportunity for all.

How to Apply

Please submit your CV. Shortlisted candidates will be invited to interview. This role requires BPSS (Baseline Personnel Security Standard) clearance please flag in your application if you already hold clearance.