SC Cleared Lead AI Engineer - AI Adoption & Governance

SC Cleared Lead AI Engineer - AI Adoption & Governance

£550 per day | Inside IR35 | 6 months | Mainly Remote

We're seeking an experienced SC Cleared Lead AI Engineer to drive AI adoption, governance, and engineering best practice across a large-scale organisation. This is a senior technical leadership role focused on establishing standards, defining guardrails, and enabling teams to adopt AI technologies safely, effectively, and at scale.

You'll combine hands-on AI engineering expertise with strategic influence, helping delivery teams integrate modern AI tooling while building sustainable communities of practice and adoption frameworks.

Active SC Clearance is essential and must be in place at the point of application.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead AI adoption initiatives and establish engineering standards, guardrails, and best practices.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and translate innovation into practical, reusable solutions.
• Build and support communities of practice, champions networks, and knowledge-sharing forums.
• Deliver coaching, mentoring, and targeted training to increase organisational AI capability.
• Partner with stakeholders, suppliers, and technology providers to promote consistent approaches to AI implementation.
• Identify and resolve barriers to AI adoption across governance, tooling, security, data, and delivery functions.
• Design and run proofs of value, measuring outcomes against defined hypotheses and success criteria.
• Work directly with engineering teams to embed AI capabilities into real-world delivery environments.
• Provide expert guidance on AI risk, governance, security, quality, and maintainability considerations.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Active SC Clearance (essential).
• Strong hands-on experience building and deploying agentic AI solutions.
• Expertise in model selection, prompt engineering, agent orchestration, and tool integration.
• Experience applying AI across the Software Development Lifecycle, including code generation, testing, documentation, code review, and modernisation activities.
• Practical exposure to AI engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, Kiro, MCP, or similar technologies.
• Proven track record defining and implementing engineering standards adopted across multiple teams or programmes.
• Strong stakeholder engagement skills with the ability to influence without direct authority.
• Experience building capability through coaching, mentoring, training, or community leadership.

Desirable Experience

• Software engineering background within complex enterprise environments.
• Knowledge of Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, AI gateways, model routing, authentication, and cost optimisation.
• Experience evaluating AI tools and techniques using structured assessment frameworks.
• Understanding of AI evaluation methodologies, testing frameworks, and performance measurement.
• Awareness of security, governance, privacy, and assurance considerations relating to AI adoption.

What's on Offer?

• £550 per day
• Inside IR35
• 6-month contract
• Mainly remote working
• Active SC clearance required
• Opportunity to shape AI adoption and engineering standards at scale
• Work with cutting-edge AI technologies and emerging agentic frameworks

If you're an SC-cleared AI Engineer with experience driving adoption, governance, and hands-on implementation of AI tooling at scale, we'd like to hear from you.

Reasonable Adjustments:

Respect and equality are core values to us. We are proud of the diverse and inclusive community we have built, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and perspectives. Our success is driven by our people, united by the spirit of partnership to deliver the best resourcing solutions for our clients.

If you need any help or adjustments during the recruitment process for any reason, please let us know when you apply or talk to the recruiters directly so we can support you.