At a Glance
- Tasks: Build and maintain document and retrieval pipelines for AI-enabled planning tools.
- Company: Join a specialist tech consultancy working on high-profile defence AI programmes.
- Benefits: Competitive contract rate, dynamic team environment, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Work in Central London with a mixed team and clear delivery milestones.
- Why this job: Make a real impact in defence technology while developing your skills in a cutting-edge field.
- Qualifications: Strong Python skills and experience with data pipelines and unstructured document ingestion.
The predicted salary is between 63000 - 77000 £ per year.
Data Engineer Document & Retrieval Pipelines | SC Cleared Morela is supporting a specialist technology consultancy on a high-profile defence AI programme, and we are looking for a Data Engineer to own the document and retrieval pipelines behind a set of AI-enabled planning tools.
This is a contract role on a two-year programme, Outside IR35, based in Central London.
Active SC clearance is required.
About the Client Our client is a specialist technology consultancy that embeds engineers directly into government and defence delivery teams.
They are known for long-term programme work and for giving their engineers genuine ownership of what they build.
This is one of their most strategically important programmes.
The Role You will join a team building AI-enabled planning tools.
The core of the role is document and retrieval pipelines: getting messy, real-world documents in, then making them structured, searchable and measurable.
The first increment produced working prototypes.
The next increment is about building on them to deliver reliable, production-grade services for real end users, so there will be a strong focus on scaling and hardening the pipelines.
You will work as part of a mixed team of engineers, military and civil service colleagues, so being able to represent yourself well and explain technical decisions clearly matters as much as the engineering.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain ingestion pipelines that extract clean text from PDF, DOCX and HTML, including layout-aware parsing of headings, tables and multi-column pages
- Design and build retrieval pipelines for RAG, covering chunking strategy, embedding models, vector search and metadata design
- Own the Postgres layer, including schema design, indexing (including vector indexes) and performance at scale
- Build labelled ground-truth datasets and use them to measure and improve retrieval quality
- Take prototype code to production, hardening pipelines with batching, idempotent re-ingestion and robust error handling
- Containerise services and maintain CI/CD pipelines so changes ship reliably Essential Requirements
- Clearance: Active SC clearance
- Python: Strong Python, with experience building and testing data pipelines and APIs (Fast API, Py Test)
- Unstructured document ingestion: Extracting clean text from PDF, DOCX and HTML, including layout-aware parsing (headings, tables, multi-column pages)
- RAG retrieval pipelines: Chunking strategy, embedding models, vector search (Postgres with pgvector or similar) and metadata design
- Postgres: Schema design, indexing (including vector indexes) and performance at scale
- Retrieval evaluation: Building labelled ground-truth datasets and measuring retrieval quality
- Productionising code: Hardening pipelines (batching, idempotent re-ingestion, error handling), containerisation with Docker and CI/CD with Git Hub Actions Desirable Experience
- Cloud deployment, particularly Google Cloud; AWS (Bedrock, S3, ECR, EKS) is also used today
- Kubernetes and Helm
- Working with LLM providers (Open AI, Anthropic, Bedrock) and locally hosted models (Ollama)
- Data labelling workflows (e. g.
- Label Studio)
- Government, defence or other security-cleared programmes Working Environment Central London, embedded in a mixed programme team with clear delivery milestones.
Outside IR35, two-year contract.
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Data Engineer - Document & Retrieval Pipelines - Contract in London employer: VIQU IT Recruitment
At VIQU, we pride ourselves on being an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work culture that fosters innovation and collaboration. As a Senior Information Security Analyst in Southampton, you'll benefit from a hybrid working model, competitive remuneration, and opportunities for professional growth within a leading offshore law firm focused on secure technology adoption. Join us to make a meaningful impact in the realm of AI and information security while enjoying a supportive environment that values your contributions.
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We think you need these skills to ace Data Engineer - Document & Retrieval Pipelines - Contract in London
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