Machine Learning Engineer

Machine Learning/ML Ops Engineer
Outside IR35: £500 - 625 p/d
Active SC Clearance Required
4 days a week into East London
6 months initial contract, long term programme

The Role
We're looking for a Senior MLOps Engineer to build and run the infrastructure that takes machine learning models from research into production. You'll work alongside AI developers, software engineers and technical leadership to turn R&D into reliable, deployable products in the cloud and on edge hardware. The work is for a long-term programme in the defence and security sector.

This is a hands-on role, and you'll have real influence over the architecture of the ML platform.

What you'll do

• Design and maintain ML training pipelines, including distributed training at scale
• Build experiment tracking, model registry and data versioning capability
• Optimise models for production and edge deployment
• Containerise ML workloads, including multi-architecture builds for cloud and edge targets
• Implement CI/CD for ML systems
• Build monitoring and observability for models in production
• Orchestrate ML workflows and event-driven pipelines

What you'll bring

• Strong commercial MLOps or ML engineering experience, taking models from R&D into production
• Distributed training frameworks (eg Ray, DeepSpeed, PyTorch Lightning)
• Experiment tracking and model registries (eg MLflow or similar)
• Model optimisation (eg ONNX, TensorRT, quantisation)
• Docker and containerised deployment
• CI/CD tooling (eg GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar)
• Monitoring and observability (eg Prometheus, Grafana)
• Active SC clearance

Nice to have

• Edge AI deployment, ideally NVIDIA Jetson and DeepStream
• Computer vision or video pipelines (eg GStreamer)
• Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Metaflow or similar orchestration tools
• Kafka or other event-driven architectures
• Data versioning tools (eg DVC, DeepLake)
• Experience with imagery, geospatial or sensor data
• Previous defence, government or security-sector programmes
• MSc or PhD in Computer Science, ML or a related field, or equivalent commercial experience