Machine Learning / ML Ops Engineer
Outside IR35: £500 - 625 p/d
Active SC Clearance Required
4 days a week into East London
6 months initial contract, long term programme

The Role
We're looking for a Senior MLOps Engineer to build and run the infrastructure that takes machine learning models from research into production. You'll work alongside AI developers, software engineers and technical leadership to turn R&D into reliable, deployable products in the cloud and on edge hardware. The work is for a long-term programme in the defence and security sector.
This is a hands-on role, and you'll have real influence over the architecture of the ML platform.

What you'll do

Design and maintain ML training pipelines, including distributed training at scale
Build experiment tracking, model registry and data versioning capability
Optimise models for production and edge deployment
Containerise ML workloads, including multi-architecture builds for cloud and edge targets
Implement CI/CD for ML systems
Build monitoring and observability for models in production
Orchestrate ML workflows and event-driven pipelines

What you'll bring
Strong commercial MLOps or ML engineering experience, taking models from R&D into production
Distributed training frameworks (e.g. Ray, DeepSpeed, PyTorch Lightning)
Experiment tracking and model registries (e.g. MLflow or similar)
Model optimisation (e.g. ONNX, TensorRT, quantisation)
Docker and containerised deployment
CI/CD tooling (e.g. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar)
Monitoring and observability (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana)
Active SC clearance

Nice to have
Edge AI deployment, ideally NVIDIA Jetson and DeepStream
Computer vision or video pipelines (e.g. GStreamer)
Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Metaflow or similar orchestration tools
Kafka or other event-driven architectures
Data versioning tools (e.g. DVC, DeepLake)
Experience with imagery, geospatial or sensor data
Previous defence, government or security-sector programmes
MSc or PhD in Computer Science, ML or a related field, or equivalent commercial experience