Staff Software Engineer, Data in London

Staff Software Engineer London, UKAbout the role Applied Intelligence Systems (AIS) is part of the Scale Generative AI Platform (SGP), focused on pushing the frontier of what agentic applications can do across diverse enterprise and government use cases.

We build the infrastructure and tooling that power agentic AI in production, paired with applied ML research, design, and evaluation to ensure these systems perform reliably at the scale our customers demand.

AIS spans multiple workstreams — agent evaluation and oversight, orchestration and tool-use infrastructure, model and systems optimization, and applied research on new agent capabilities.

This role owns the context and memory capabilities within AIS, including their correctness, performance, and evaluation.

We are looking for a Staff Engineer who can own hard technical problems end to end, from the software systems that serve context to agents through to the evaluation choices that determine whether that context is actually useful.

This role suits someone comfortable moving between distributed systems engineering and applied ML, because the team is built the same way, with software engineers and ML engineers working the same roadmap rather than two separate tracks.

Design and maintain the evaluation methodology for memory and retrieval quality, including the rubrics and benchmarks that catch regressions before customers do.

Direct experience with the ML and information retrieval problems underneath modern AI systems, such as embeddings, vector search, retrieval augmented generation, fine-tuning, or agent memory architectures, and the judgement to choose between them for a given problem.

You do not need to be equally deep in both software engineering and applied ML, but you need enough range in each to make good calls without waiting for a specialist.

Proficiency in Python, and experience with the infrastructure that production ML and agentic systems run on (containers, cloud platforms, and CI/CD).

Track record of setting technical standards that outlived the project they were built for, and of influencing decisions beyond your own team through design reviews, technical writing, or direct mentorship of software and ML engineers.

Contributions to open-source agentic AI projects.

PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role.

At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions.

Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact.

We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.

We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities.

If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.

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