Senior Machine Learning Engineer in England

This range is provided by Burns Sheehan. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range. One day a week in London (exceptional circumstances could allow one day a month). Equity Options. Pension matched up to 7%. Work abroad for up to 3 months.

Are you ready to lead a world‑class Machine Learning team delivering cutting‑edge, production‑grade systems? We’re looking for a Lead Machine Learning Engineer — a "plug-and-play" leader with proven experience in people management and deep technical expertise — to shape the direction of our GenAI and retrieval-focused streams.

This is a leadership role where you’ll not only design and build advanced machine learning solutions but also line‑manage engineers, coordinate delivery across high‑impact ML projects, and define the technical bar across the team. Your compensation reflects both the strategic leadership scope and technical excellence expected in this role.

What you’ll be doing:

• Lead and manage a team of machine learning engineers — providing mentorship, setting performance standards, and guiding career development.
• Set the technical direction for GenAI and retrieval-based systems, ensuring consistent architecture, tooling, and research-to-production workflows.
• Act as delivery owner across multiple ML streams, coordinating timelines, resources, and cross‑functional collaboration.
• Drive best practices for scalable, reproducible, and robust ML system development.
• Be hands‑on when needed, contributing to model development and high‑impact technical decisions.
• Stay on top of research and emerging trends, bringing innovative approaches to real‑world problems.
• Promote a culture of experimentation, open communication, and continuous learning across the team.

What you’ll bring:

• Experience line‑managing ML engineers and leading delivery across multiple, concurrent ML workstreams.
• Strong technical background in machine learning engineering — with production‑level experience in Python, SQL, and frameworks like PyTorch or scikit-learn.
• Deep expertise in GenAI, LLMs, RAG systems, NLP, recommendation engines, or information retrieval stacks.
• Strong understanding of the full model lifecycle — from research, experimentation to deployment and monitoring.
• Familiarity with cloud‑based ML infrastructure — especially AWS.
• Clear communication skills, strategic mindset, and the ability to make trade-offs in a fast‑moving, startup‑style environment.

This is more than just a leadership role — it’s a chance to help shape one of the most advanced Machine Learning teams in the UK. If you’re looking to step into a role with real ownership, high impact, and the opportunity to define what great ML engineering looks like, we want to hear from you.

Seniority level: Mid‑Senior level

Employment type: Full‑time

Job function: Finance and Information Technology

Industries: Technology, Information and Media, Financial Services, and Venture Capital and Private Equity.