Staff ML Engineer | Agentic AI & Applied ML | London (3 days per week on-site) | Contract | Inside IR35
We're supporting a global technology-driven organisation that's scaling advanced AI capability across its UK engineering function.
The organisation has already invested heavily in enterprise AI platforms and Agentic AI frameworks. The next challenge is moving beyond individual use cases: driving adoption across engineering teams, establishing common engineering patterns and enabling increasingly complex AI and ML solutions to operate safely and reliably in production.
This is a senior hands-on Staff Engineer position with significant influence over the technical direction of AI Engineering across the organisation.
You'll be responsible for:
Designing robust, production-grade AI and ML systems
Driving adoption of Agentic AI across multiple engineering teams
Defining reusable engineering standards, architectures and implementation patterns
Designing and evolving production RAG and retrieval architectures
Establishing effective LangGraph/LangChain patterns for agentic applications
Improving AI evaluation, testing, observability and production monitoring
Developing guardrails, controls and approaches to hallucination and model risk
Supporting the move towards increasingly high-risk and high-complexity AI/ML use cases
Establishing best practice across MLOps, CI/CD and deployment
Influencing senior engineers and technical stakeholders without direct line management
Helping engineering teams use AI-assisted development tools effectively within their workflowsWe're looking for deep experience across:
Python and strong software engineering fundamentals
Production Machine Learning / AI engineering
AWS
Agentic AI and LLM-based applications
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
LangChain and/or LangGraph
Vector databases and retrieval
MLOps and production deployment
AI evaluation, testing and observability
AI governance, model risk and engineering controls
ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow or Scikit-learnExperience operating in complex, regulated or high-risk environments would be particularly valuable.
More important than any individual technology is the ability to take sophisticated AI/ML use cases from concept into production, make sound engineering decisions and raise engineering standards across multiple teams.
You'll also be joining an engineering environment actively adopting AI-assisted development tooling, including Claude, so we're particularly interested in engineers who are already using AI to improve their own software engineering workflows.
Contract
£800–1,200 per day inclusive
Initial 6-month contract with a long-term programme roadmap
Inside IR35
London – 3 days per week on-site
