Staff ML Engineer | Agentic AI & Applied ML | London (Hybrid) | Contract | Inside IR35

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 workflows

We'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-learn

Experience 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