Senior Applied AI Engineer – Defence & National Security Location: London / Oxford – Hybrid
Contract: 6 months initially, with strong potential for extension
Day Rate: £700–£900 per day, depending on experience
IR35: Outside IR35
Start Date: Immediate
Security Clearance: UK SC eligibility required (British Passport and 5+ Years of residency in UK)
An active SC or DV strongly preferred
About the Role We are working with a fast-growing UK frontier technology company developing advanced AI systems for defence, national security, critical infrastructure and other high-stakes environments.
The business is looking for a Senior Applied AI Engineer to take genuine technical ownership of the design and delivery of production-grade agentic AI systems.
This is a builder's role rather than an integration role . You will design and implement systems from the ground up, make architecture-level decisions, write production-quality code and own features through to deployment.
The systems you build will operate in environments where reliability, security and trust are critical. You will therefore be expected to engineer for real-world conditions, including high workloads, degraded connectivity, secure infrastructure and fully offline or air-gapped deployments.
What You'll Be Doing Design and build multi-agent AI systems from the ground up, using frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, Haystack or similar where appropriate.
Develop the orchestration, state management and tool-calling infrastructure required to make agentic systems reliable in production.
Integrate large language models and vision-language models into reasoning, retrieval, summarisation and task-execution pipelines.
Build retrieval, memory, evaluation and guardrail capabilities around AI systems.
Design and implement production pipelines covering data ingestion, processing and inference.
Work with large-scale multimodal datasets spanning text, imagery, telemetry and sensor data.
Design indexing, embedding and retrieval systems capable of operating across multi-terabyte datasets.
Deploy AI systems across cloud, on-premises, sovereign and fully offline environments.
Engineer for re...
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