PERSON SPECIFICATION

We’re looking for experienced software engineers with a passion for building products that augment human capabilities and improve citizens’ lives.

ESSENTIAL SKILLS:

• Proficiency in Python.
• Strong software engineering skills with a focus on building production-ready systems
• An understanding of deploying and monitoring such systems in a cloud environment.
• Familiarity with tools for working with Large Language Models via API or in a local context (e.g. HuggingFace transformers).
• Experience with natural language processing, deep learning and generative AI.
• Passion for building products that augment human capabilities and improves citizens’ lives.
• Have a humble attitude and an eagerness to help others with empathy
• Working in dynamic environments and navigating ambiguity, prioritising ruthlessly where necessary

EXPERIENCE OF THE FOLLOWING WOULD BE BENEFICIAL BUT NOT ESSENTIAL:

• Building AI agents, or products that rely on AI agents
• Developing and working with tools and interfaces for AI applications (e.g. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol)
• Training traditional Machine Learning and Deep Learning models
• Experience delivering applications to production
• Hands-on experience with containerisation technologies such as Docker.
• 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.
• Supporting and enabling technical teams via upskilling, mentoring and conflict resolution.
• Owning outcomes end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you’re missing to get the job done to ensure your team succeeds
• Explaining complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences with clarity
• 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.
  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 assessment

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)
• 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

ABOUT THE ROLE

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

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

• Ideating and developing one or more AI projects. These could be fully-fledged internal applications the incubator is building. Alternatively, they might be services we’re building for the government’s biggest missions in collaboration with other departments, where we work closely with technical counterparts.
• Writing and reviewing code daily.
• Ensuring that the members of your technical team are delivering to the best of their ability, ensuring continued investment in the project and in their own skills.
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams and senior stakeholders to quickly understand customer needs and translate them into pragmatic technical solutions leveraging AI.
• Leading the design and establishment of frameworks, tools and processes to responsibly develop, deploy and monitor AI products.
• Evangelising best practices in applied AI across government.
• Highly focussed on solving problems and identifying the critical path to impact.
• Staying on top of the latest developments in AI, including new models and paradigms.

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

• Leadership
• Communicating and influencing
• Delivering at pac