Lead AI Engineer

Location: Hybrid, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, with weekly travel to Newcastle and on-site attendance for workshops, knowledge-transfer sessions, and onboarding. All production system and data access must be performed solely from within the UK.

Salary: £100,000–£120,000 plus benefits.

Company

hirify.global is a digital consultancy delivering technology solutions and large-scale AI adoption programmes for UK government departments and public-sector organisations.

What you will do

• Design, build, test, and ship production AI components, including RAG pipelines, retrieval and embedding infrastructure, orchestration logic, and integration layers.
• Lead engineering practice within the delivery team by setting coding standards, reviewing designs and pull requests, resolving complex technical issues, and mentoring engineers.
• Implement responsible-AI guardrails, including bias mitigation checks, evaluation harnesses, and human-in-the-loop review points aligned with ATRS and NCSC Secure by Design principles.
• Build secure, observable, and highly available AI services with logging, monitoring, alerting, and rollback capabilities for sensitive public-sector data.
• Pair with and upskill government engineers through the OKUA framework and Docs-as-Code practices to transfer capability to the internal team.
• Design resource-efficient AI infrastructure and models in line with Green AI and Net Zero commitments.

Requirements

• Expert-level coding and scripting skills, with strong general-purpose programming experience, most commonly in Python, applied to AI/ML systems and production-grade, well-tested code.
• Practitioner-level systems design experience, including integration of components into architect-defined systems and understanding of trade-offs across the stack.
• Practitioner-level data engineering experience building reliable pipelines to ingest, clean, and prepare structured, unstructured, and legacy data for AI consumption.
• Practitioner-level DevOps and continuous-delivery experience with CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and automated deployment for AI workloads.
• Practitioner-level testing and evaluation experience, including evaluation harnesses for retrieval accuracy, hallucination rates, bias, and fairness.
• Experience diagnosing and resolving complex, ambiguous technical issues under production pressure and delivering iteratively in blended multidisciplinary teams including civil servants.
• Hands-on experience with semantic search, vector and embedding infrastructure, and RAG pipeline construction.
• Experience with LLM orchestration and agentic frameworks, prompt engineering, systematic evaluation, hallucination detection, safety testing, LLMOps/MLOps, model versioning, deployment, monitoring, and rollback.
• Cloud-native engineering experience across AWS, Azure, or GCP, including AI/ML tooling, containerisation, infrastructure-as-code, and secure-by-design engineering for sensitive public-sector data.
• Lead Engineer-level experience aligned with the Government Digital and Data framework.
• Ability to work from within the UK for all production system and data access.

Nice to have

• AWS, Azure, or GCP associate or professional certifications.
• Experience delivering AI or digital services within UK central government or the wider public sector.
• Experience fine-tuning or adapting open-source or foundation models for a specific domain.
• Open-source contributions or active engagement in AI/ML engineering communities.
• Experience designing for sustainability or Green IT commitments.
• Experience or exposure to Virtual Assistants, Robotic Process Automation, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Generative AI, Frontier LLMs, and Predictive AI.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative, value-driven delivery focused on creating value early, integrity, commitment, and diversity and inclusion.
• Flexible working arrangements are supported within the hybrid working pattern.
• Reasonable adjustments are provided throughout recruitment and employment as a Disability Confident Level 1 employer.
• Permanent employment with benefits.

Hiring process

• Submit a CV.
• Shortlisted candidates are invited to interview.
• BPSS clearance is required; candidates should indicate whether they already hold clearance.