Senior AI Engineer in Cheshire

Must be eligible for SC or DV Clearance. Permanent or Contract. HYBRID (2 days a week onsite) Oxfordshire initially but could change to London. You will work closely with the entire team. You will be trusted with judgment calls. You will influence the business and see the impact of your work every day. If you are excited by ownership, pace and purpose - and by building something that genuinely matters - we would love to hear from you.

What You Will Be Doing

We are looking for AI engineers who build and ship agentic AI systems in production. You will work at the cutting edge of agentic and generative AI - designing multi-agent pipelines, integrating large language models and vision-language models into real workflows, and deploying them into secure and air-gapped environments for defence and national security customers. This is a delivery role. You will own features end-to-end - from design through to deployment in constrained environments where reliability and security matter more than speed to market.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and optimise multi-agent AI systems using frameworks such as LangGraph, Haystack, or equivalent.
• Integrate LLMs and vision-language models into agent workflows for reasoning, search, summarisation, and task execution.
• Deploy AI systems into cloud, on-premises, and air-gapped environments.
• Build production-ready pipelines from data ingestion through to inference.
• Experience with observability for AI systems, including agent behaviour, model performance, and failure modes.
• Collaborate with engineers, product leads, and customers to translate requirements into working systems.
• Contribute to evaluation frameworks, system integration, and performance tracking.
• Act as a technical authority for agentic AI - setting design patterns for junior engineers.

Requirements

• Active SC clearance.
• Commercial experience building multi-agent or agentic AI systems in production.
• Strong Python skills and hands-on experience with LLM frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain, Haystack, or similar).
• Experience deploying AI/ML systems into production environments.
• Familiarity with Docker, Git, and cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
• Understanding of secure deployment patterns - air-gapped, on-premises, or sovereign cloud.

Preferred

• Experience with multimodal reasoning.
• Experience with edge or offline AI deployments.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes (EKS/OpenShift) for monitoring and managing deployed applications.
• MLOps experience - model evaluation, monitoring, reproducibility.
• Observability tooling for agentic systems (model drift, agent behaviour, performance monitoring).
• Experience with agent orchestration patterns and inter-agent communication protocols (e.g. A2A).
• Familiarity with MCPs for tool and context integration in agentic systems.
• Familiarity with secure-by-design development principles (ISO 27001, NIST, OWASP).
• Experience in defence, national security, or similarly regulated environments.
• Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects.

Soft Skills

• Delivery-focused - you ship working systems, not prototypes.
• Comfortable operating across the stack when needed.
• Strong communicator - can present to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Thrives in small teams with high ownership.

Benefits include:

• Rapid career progression and personal growth.
• Flexible working hours.
• Opportunity to shape the future of a fast-growing business.
• Hybrid working model.
• Company pension (NEST) with 4% employer contribution.
• Private Healthcare.
• 29 days holiday + public holidays.