AI Deployment Specialist - Justice AI Unit (Ref: 23921) in Edinburgh

This position is based Nationally.

The Justice AI Unit is part of the Service Transformation Group: an interdisciplinary team of technologists, product specialists and operational experts working to embed responsible AI across the justice system. Our mission is to drive the responsible and safe adoption of AI so that our people can deliver world-leading public services.

• Deliver the AI Action Plan for Justice;
• Identify, test and scale transformative AI products;
• Embed safety, ethics and accountability in the design and operation of AI-enabled services;
• Build the capability our people need to use AI well;
• Partner with experts across government, industry and academia;
• Promote transparency, public engagement and responsible AI standards.

The role involves leading the scaling of Justice Transcribe across Probation. You will be accountable for setting the deployment approach, leading delivery across probation regions and ensuring that adoption produces measurable, sustained improvements in frontline services.

You will translate the Justice AI Unit’s objectives into deployment priorities and plans. Within agreed strategic objectives and governance arrangements, you will decide deployment sequencing, prioritise opportunities and direct deployment effort. You will assess readiness and impact, making recommendations to the appropriate decision makers on whether deployments should start, expand, pause or stop.

You will lead colleagues across HMPPS and probation regions, bringing operational leaders, practitioners, product teams and technical specialists together around shared outcomes. This will require you to secure commitments, agree responsibilities, resolve competing priorities and hold colleagues to account for agreed actions across organisational boundaries.

You will also lead the identification and prioritisation of new use cases. Drawing on frontline evidence and deployment experience, you will influence product priorities and operational plans, helping senior leaders decide where AI can deliver value and what needs to change to achieve it.

Your leadership will be grounded in a detailed understanding of operational work. You will spend time with frontline teams, investigate barriers to adoption and lead practical changes to technology, workflows and deployment processes. You will need enough technical fluency to challenge proposals, work confidently with engineers and data specialists, and make informed trade-offs.

Your success will be measured by safe and sustained use, time saved, service quality and better outcomes for staff and the people they support.

Responsibilities

• Lead the scaling of Justice Transcribe across Probation.
• Set and own the deployment strategy and plan for scaling Justice Transcribe across probation regions, translating wider objectives into clear priorities, milestones and outcomes.
• Exercise delegated authority over deployment sequencing, opportunity prioritisation and the focus of deployment effort within agreed objectives and governance arrangements.
• Be accountable for deployment progress and operational impact, identifying where delivery or adoption is falling short and leading corrective action.
• Adapt the deployment approach as evidence, operational needs and product capability change.
• Provide senior leaders with clear assessments of progress, benefits, risks and decisions requiring their intervention.
• Lead delivery across organisational boundaries.
• Agree responsibilities, commitments and dependencies with the teams involved, and hold colleagues to account for agreed actions.
• Secure support from regional and service leaders for the operational changes needed to make deployments successful.
• Resolve competing priorities and disagreements between stakeholders, escalating decisions that exceed the role’s authority with clear options and recommendations.
• Identify the capacity and specialist input required for delivery, negotiate commitments with the relevant leads and adjust plans where constraints threaten outcomes.
• Set priorities and shape future use cases.
• Lead the identification and assessment of new use cases with operational leaders and frontline teams.
• Prioritise opportunities according to operational benefit, user need, feasibility, readiness and risk.
• Use evidence from deployments to influence product roadmaps, operational plans and the Justice AI Unit’s approach to scaling AI.
• Challenge proposals where the expected value, readiness or evidence is insufficient.
• Make evidence-based recommendations to senior decision makers on starting, expanding, pausing or stopping deployments.
• Lead practical change in frontline services.
• Build a detailed understanding of frontline workflows and lead the resolution of barriers spanning technology, process and people.
• Translate operational needs into clear requirements and agreed changes with product, engineering and service teams.
• Lead the design and testing of workflows across systems and organisational boundaries, ensuring they can be adopted and supported in practice.
• Investigate technical and operational problems directly, using data, prototypes or configuration changes where appropriate.
• Make and explain trade-offs between user value, delivery pace, safety, technical constraints and maintainability.
• Lead safe and responsible deployment.
• Establish deployment readiness criteria with operational, product, security, data and assurance colleagues, and assess proposed deployments against them.
• Ensure policy, legal, security and AI assurance requirements are reflected in workable deployment controls and operational processes.
• Ensure accountability for AI-assisted outputs and decisions is clear to the people using and overseeing the service.
• Maintain oversight of deployment risks and ensure appropriate action, ownership and escalation.
• Lead improvements to the deployment approach following live-service issues, user feedback and assurance findings.
• Demonstrate impact and build capability to scale.
• Set clear expectations for deployment outcomes and establish measures before rollout.
• Assess time saved, service quality, sustained adoption, user confidence and unintended consequences using quantitative and qualitative evidence.
• Lead action where deployments are failing to achieve the intended benefits.
• Establish reusable deployment methods, guidance and processes that enable further regions and teams to adopt effective approaches.
• Share lessons across HMPPS and the Justice AI Unit, improving the organisation’s ability to identify and deploy valuable AI use cases.

The duties and responsibilities above describe the post as currently envisaged and are not exhaustive. The post holder may be asked to undertake reasonable additional duties at a similar level.

Person specification

Please refer to Job Description.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Changing and Improving
• Making Effective Decisions
• Communicating and Influencing

Benefits

Alongside your salary of 58,511, Ministry of Justice contributes 16,950 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Access to learning and development, a working environment that supports a range of flexible working options to enhance your work life balance, and a working culture which encourages inclusion and diversity.

A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%.

Annual Leave, Public Holidays, Season Ticket Advance.

For more information about the recruitment process, benefits and allowances and answers to general queries, please click the below link which will direct you to our Candidate Information Page.