Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Job Title: Senior AI/ML Engineer Location: Cambridgeshire Salary: Up to £160,000 DOE A well-regarded technology consultancy is growing its Defence and National Security practice and is looking for a Senior AI/ML Engineer to join a high-calibre team working on technically complex, meaningful programmes. This is a hands-on engineering role where you will design and build production-grade AI and machine learning systems, working alongside engineers and technical specialists on challenging, real-world problems. The work spans LLM-based applications, MLOps, and inference-optimised systems, with exposure to secure and constrained deployment environments. The Role You will take ownership of end-to-end ML system development, from architecture through to deployment, contributing to technically ambitious projects with genuine operational impact. You will collaborate closely with software engineers, data engineers, and client teams, and at senior level you will be expected to provide technical direction and support more junior colleagues. Requirements * Degree (minimum 2:1) in Computer Science or a quantitative discipline from a RUSSELL Group University * Strong Python engineering skills with deep understanding of machine learning fundamentals * Experience developing and deploying production-grade ML systems * Familiarity with MLOps practices and modern development methodologies * Experience with version control, CI/CD, containerisation, and test automation * Current UK security clearance, or eligibility and willingness to obtain it * Experience in or strong interest in Defence, National Security, or similarly regulated environments Desirable Experience * In-depth knowledge of LLM principles, including inference optimisations such as KV caching, speculative decoding, and parallel decoding * Hands-on experience with prompt engineering, agentic workflows, evaluation harnesses, and retrieval pipelines * Experience fine-tuning and evaluating foundation models * Exposure to AI safety, explainability, or secure AI deployment * Experience developing for edge, constrained, or air-gapped environments If this role sounds like a strong fit, please apply below or get in touch directly.