AI Engineer in Newcastle upon Tyne

Scrumconnect Consulting is a multi‑award‑winning digital consultancy, recognised for delivering impactful and innovative technology solutions across UK government departments.

Our work has positively influenced the lives of over 40 million UK citizens.

Overview

We're looking for an AI Engineer to build the application-level AI capability inside a large-scale AI adoption programme for a central government department.

Where the Machine Learning Engineer trains models and the MLOps Engineer runs the platform, you sit closest to the end product: turning LLMs, retrieval systems, and agentic workflows into working, usable features that integrate with the department's existing services.

You'll work inside a collaborative "Rainbow Team" alongside civil servants, implementing the guardrails and standards set by the Lead AI Engineer and Lead Technical Architect.

Key Responsibilities

• Build & Integrate – Implement RAG pipelines, prompt templates, and agentic workflows, and wire them into application logic that connects with the department's legacy and multi-cloud systems.
• Prompt Engineering & Evaluation – Design, test, and iterate on prompts and retrieval strategies; run structured evaluations to track answer quality, retrieval accuracy, and hallucination rate over time.
• Responsible AI in Practice – Implement the specific guardrails and human‑in‑the‑loop checkpoints defined by the leads — this is an execution role, not a policy‑setting one.
• Documentation & Handover – Contribute to "Docs-as-Code" artifacts supporting the OKUA knowledge‑transfer framework, so the features you build can be understood and maintained by internal government engineers.
• Required Skills & Experience
• Practical experience building applications using LLMs or other foundation models, via API or self-hosted
• Experience with RAG architectures, vector databases, and embedding‑based retrieval
• Solid general‑purpose programming (commonly Python) and API design/integration skills
• Prompt engineering with a systematic, evaluation‑driven approach rather than trial and error
• Familiarity with agentic/orchestration frameworks and multi‑step AI workflows
• Comfortable working within secure, regulated environments and handling sensitive data appropriately
• Experience delivering digital services within UK central government or the wider public sector
• Familiarity with GOV. UK Service Standard expectations
• Exposure to open‑source LLM tooling or communities
• Familiarity with AI/ML tooling on AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Location and Working Pattern

Hybrid, based from Newcastle upon Tyne, with on‑site attendance required for workshops, knowledge‑transfer sessions, and onboarding.

All production system and data access must be performed solely from within the UK.

We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds, including women, people with disabilities, and diverse communities, as well as those seeking flexible working arrangements.

As a Disability Confident Level 1 employer, we provide reasonable adjustments throughout recruitment and employment.

BPSS clearance is required. Please flag in your application if you already hold clearance.

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