Python Engineer in Manchester

Salary – £540 per day (Outside IR35)

Contract – 6-Month (potential for extension)

Work location – Remote (Quarterly Travel to Edinburgh)

We are supporting a major public sector organisation with the recruitment of an experienced Python Engineer to join an AI‑driven automation team on an initial 6‑month contract. This role is Outside IR35, offers £540 per day, and is fully remote, with quarterly on‑site collaboration days in Edinburgh.

Overview

The successful engineer will play a key role in providing hands‑on technical leadership within an agile development team building advanced automation capabilities. The team is focused on leveraging document processing, computer vision, and machine learning/LLMs to improve high‑volume, low‑complexity workflows across a national‑level digital registration domain. The work involves enhancing existing automation systems, conducting R&D into new AI‑driven solutions, and helping to embed these tools into wider digital platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Enhance and extend an existing productionised automation service using OCR, Object Detection, and LLM‑based AI.
• Develop system components supporting deed document OCR and LLM analysis for automation decision‑making.
• Conduct research spikes to expand the scope, accuracy, and reliability of automation workflows.
• Provide high‑quality support for operational services, ensuring stability and troubleshooting across multiple environments.
• Contribute to R&D initiatives aimed at developing innovative automation approaches.
• Produce clean, maintainable, and sustainable software following best engineering practices.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies, pairing/mobbing, code reviews, and collaborative engineering activities.
• Maintain effective monitoring, dashboards, deployment pipelines, and support processes.
• Ensure all developed software meets non‑functional requirements (security, accessibility, performance, maintainability, etc.).
• Mentor team members where appropriate and actively contribute to technical knowledge‑sharing.
• Support disaster recovery assurance activities, including planned weekend testing events.

Essential Skills & Experience

• AI/ML & Computer Vision

• Hands‑on experience with OCR, Object Detection, and LLM implementation.
• Strong knowledge of ML/AI libraries: Transformers/Hugging Face, PyTorch, OpenCV, PIL/Pillow, YOLO object detection frameworks.

• Excellent Python (3.9+) skills: OOP, decorators, context managers, async/await.
• Strong understanding of algorithms, optimisation, debugging, and error handling.

• Proficiency with Pandas, NumPy.
• Experience with SQLAlchemy or psycopg2 for database interaction.
• Boto3 for AWS automation and service integration.

• Lambda development and event handling.
• S3 operations including multipart uploads and event notifications.
• CloudWatch for monitoring and debugging.
• IAM and security best practices.
• CDK for IaC deployments.
• Experience with SQS and containerised deployments via EKS/ECS/Kubernetes.

• FastAPI for REST endpoints and model‑serving.
• Requests library for external integrations.
• Experience with JWT/OAuth authentication flows.

• High‑quality AI/ML software delivery within collaborative teams.
• Experience in serverless and service‑based architectures.
• Ability to communicate complex AI concepts clearly to technical and non‑technical audiences.

• Agile (Scrum/Kanban).
• XP engineering practices (TDD, pair programming).
• Strong understanding of IaC frameworks.

Desirable Experience

• Custom model architecture development.
• Advanced LLM fine‑tuning (LoRA, QLoRA, parameter‑efficient methods).
• Multi‑modal AI systems (text, image, structured data).
• RLHF and alignment techniques.
• ML workflow orchestration (Airflow, Dagster).
• Experiment tracking (MLflow, Weights & Biases).
• Real‑time model serving, A/B testing, and modern ML deployment strategies.

This is an initial 6‑month contract, with the possibility of extension, working for our Public Sector client in Scotland. The role is paying £540 per day Outside IR35 and is fully remote, with quarterly travel to Edinburgh for team collaboration.