Lead Applied AI Engineer (i.AI)

at  Cabinet Office

JOB SUMMARY

Government must seize the opportunity of AI to drive outcomes in the public interest. This is of critical importance now. Government needs innovation and must not sleep on the opportunity presented by AI to drive better services for taxpayers and citizens.
In November 2023, the creation of the incubator for AI (i.AI) was announced, and following early successes, the team was expanded in March 2024. Our mission is to harness the opportunity of AI to improve lives, drive growth, and deliver better public services. This is an AI product team that focuses on delivery of technical solutions to public service challenges, responding to ministerial steers about priorities and driving impact out into departments from the centre.
i.AI delivers high impact products and is mission-led, delivering value and innovation within government. We are able to move fast and build things, and are set up specifically to pivot quickly towards priority use cases, and re-use technologies for future impact.
You can see more about our work on ai.gov.uk and on LinkedIn. We work in the open and our code can be found here: https://github.com/i-dot-ai
The Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) will be moving to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to form part of the new digital centre of government. If offered the position, you will be onboarded to, and initially employed by, the Cabinet Office, but will move with us to DSIT under the machinery of government change. This is expected to happen in April 2025, but this date is subject to change. If shortlisted, the hiring panel will be happy to answer any questions you might have. You’re also welcome to reach out to us at i-dot-ai-recruitment@cabinetoffice.gov.uk
Our team is based across Bristol, Manchester and London, and we work in a hybrid manner as default. A minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace, although requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance. We will consider part-time and flexible working arrangements - we encourage you to discuss your needs with the hiring manager if you are offered the role.

JOB DESCRIPTION

We are looking for a talented, product-orientated engineer with proven delivery experience to join our team building the future of critical government AI-powered products. In this role you will work closely with researchers, engineers, designers and product leaders to build AI products that have an impact on real-world, citizen changing problems. You will be focussed on bringing together all of the technical elements needed to develop and deploy products, delivering against robust metrics that you help define.

ESSENTIAL SKILLS:

• Proficiency in Python.
• Strong software engineering skills with a focus on building robust, production-ready systems and understanding of deploying and monitoring such systems in a cloud environment.
• Experience designing software services with respect to infrastructure, considering dependencies like databases and message queues, cloud environments, and pre-existing services with which yours must collaborate.
• Passion for building products that augment human capabilities and improves citizens’ lives.
• Proven ability to collaborate with “non-engineering” disciplines, such as design and user research, to plan and deliver work of provable value as part of a product team, including prioritising, breaking down and sequencing technical work to achieve the best possible outcomes.
• Experience delivering applications to production.
• Hands-on experience with containerisation technologies such as Docker.

EXPERIENCE OF ANY OF THE FOLLOWING WOULD BE BENEFICIAL, THOUGH ALL WE REQUIRE IS AN INTEREST IN DEVELOPING THESE SKILLS IN POST:

• Familiarity with tools for working with Large Language Models via API (e.g. OpenAI, LangChain, LlamaIndex), or in a local context (e.g. HuggingFace transformers).
• Experience with natural language processing, deep learning and generative AI including prompt engineering.
• Experience supporting and enabling technical teams via upskilling, mentoring and conflict resolution.
• Experience designing CI/CD processes to support rapid, stable and continuous delivery of working software to production, with particular respect to automated testing.
  Strong candidates come from many different backgrounds, and we encourage a broad range of applications to ensure we have a well-balanced team. Studies show that talented people, especially those from groups underrepresented in their field, are more likely to doubt themselves and feel like an “imposter”. Unique perspectives enrich teams, so we urge you to have confidence in your potential contributions. If aspects of this role resonate with you, please apply. We look forward to your application.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

We’ll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Technical assessment at interview 1

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £67,126, Cabinet Office contributes £19,446 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

• Learning and development tailored to your role.
• An environment with flexible working options.
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity.
• A Civil Service Pension which provides an attractive pension, benefits for dependants and employer contributions of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by one day per year up to a maximum of 30.

Things you need to know

NATIONALITY REQUIREMENTS

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

• The overall technical direction of one or more projects. These could be fully-fledged internal applications the incubator is building. Alternatively, they might be services we’re building in collaboration with other departments, where we work closely with technical counterparts. In practice, you are likely to be writing and reviewing code daily.
• Ensuring that the members of your technical team are delivering to the best of their ability at all times, ensuring continued investment in the project and in their own skills.
• Planning, sequencing and delivering technical work across the entire stack, from infrastructure (supported by the i.AI infrastructure team) to CI/CD pipelines, databases, backend frameworks, APIs and user interfaces, with appropriate levels of static analysis and automated testing to ensure quality and consistency.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including researchers, product managers and senior stakeholders to quickly understand customer needs and translate them into pragmatic technical solutions leveraging AI.
• Lead the design and establishment of frameworks, tools and processes to responsibly develop, deploy and monitor AI products.
• Evangelise best practices in applied AI across government.

For this role we’ll be assessing you against the following Civil Service Behaviours:

• Leadership
• Communicating and influencing
• Delivering at pac