Lead Machine Learning Engineer
Share
Job Location:
Monthly Salary:
Posted on:
30+ days ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Department:
Job Summary
Were building the UKs next generation engineering powerhouse providing critical technology that strengthens national security and resilience.
At Rowden we design and integrate advanced systems and products that sense connect and protect data in challenging environments where quick decisions are vital. Our solutions use intelligent automation to enhance speed and efficiency and are built to be reliable and straightforward for critical operations in remote or high-pressure settings.
Headquartered in Bristol (UK) we combine modern engineering methods with cutting-edge commercial technology to create adaptable mission-critical systems. We focus on solving the tough challenges that others overlook ensuring our customers can operate effectively in an ever-changing world.
We are growing our ML team to support new projects and product development. We are looking for AI builders who will work on developing and deploying AI systems to solve complex problems with real-world impact. You will join an existing ML team that works in close collaboration with software hardware and systems teams to get useful AI into the hands of users. Our ML team works end-to-end from R&D to deployment across traditional ML deep learning data engineering and LLM and agentic systems.
As a Lead ML Engineer you will be responsible for technical leadership and development effort on projects and products. You will design end-to-end solutions from early concepts to deployment owning the quality of the software and ML solution. As a lead you will be expected to manage junior ML Engineers and mentor colleagues in the team uphold coding standards and act as a trusted point of expertise for good ML data and software practices and advocate for this around the business.
No prior defence experience is required. Were interested in people whove built and deployed AI systems in demanding environments and are passionate about delivering tangible value to end users whatever the sector.
Key areas of responsibility
- Own and ship ML in production: take ideas from R&D to robust maintainable deployments often onto edge or embedded hardware.
- End-to-end ownership: Lead the full lifecycle data collection/curation feature engineering model training evaluation deployment monitoring and iteration.
- Technical leadership: set direction guide design/architecture perform reviews mentor teammates and raise the engineering bar. You are a multiplier for the teams capability.
- MLOps/LLMOps: CI/CD for models containerisation/orchestration experiment tracking and registry model evaluation pipelines safety guardrails canaries and performance monitoring.
- Cross-team collaboration: partner with software systems and product colleagues; simplify complex topics for other disciplines and customers; champion AI and data.
- Data foundations: establish pragmatic data pipelines (batch/stream) that make curation provenance and reproducibility first-class.
Key skills experience and behaviours
Essential:
- Proven delivery: experience leading technical work that delivered measurable impact in production especially on edge embedded or mission-critical systems. Youve made decisions that mattered and lived with the outcomes.
- Deep domain expertise: mastery in at least one major area of ML (e.g. optimisation computer vision sequence modelling LLMs probabilistic methods) with the ability to apply that depth to real production constraints.
- ML & maths depth: strong grounding in ML/DL (optimisation generalisation probability model architecture) and the ability to reason about these trade-offs in production.
- Software development: excellent Python skills; experience with low-level languages like Rust is desirable.
- Interpersonal skills: strong communicator who can mentor influence and bridge technical and non-technical audiences.
- Education: MSc or equivalent experience required.
- Builder mindset: bias to action ownership over outcomes and comfort working through ambiguity.
Desirable:
- LLMs & agentic systems: practical experience with prompt optimisation retrieval/RAG evaluation and tool orchestration; aware of latency cost and reliability trade-offs.
- MLOps excellence: reproducible pipelines model versioning CI/CD observability and automated evaluation.
- Data engineering: proficiency with Databricks Apache Spark Delta Lake MLflow and SQL; experience integrating datasets and maintaining data quality.
- Education: PhD in AI/ML/CS or related field.
Beneficial knowledge:
- General tooling and platforms: Databricks AWS GitHub Docker/Kubernetes MLflow Jira.
- Edge deployments: Nvidia Jetson (e.g. AGX Orin) Raspberry Pi or other embedded accelerators.
- LLM/Agent tooling: DSPy vLLM evaluation harnesses prompt optimisation agent frameworks.
- Operational practices: incident response canary deployments cost/performance optimisation across edge and cloud.
About you
Youve built ML systems that persist deployed in real settings iterated over time and improved through real-world feedback. You enjoy guiding others keeping systems healthy and making the complex understandable.
Location and clearance
This role operates on a hybrid basis with 1 - 2 days per week in London and occasional travel to Bristol alongside flexible home working. Candidates must be eligible for Developed Vetting (DV) clearance.
Further information on UK security clearance levels is available here:
This role operates on a hybrid basis with 1 - 2 days per week in London and occasional travel to Bristol alongside flexible home working. Candidates must be eligible for Developed Vetting (DV) clearance.
Further information on UK security clearance levels is available here:
Working at Rowden
We are committed to building a flexible inclusive and enabling company. Our aim is to create a diverse team of talented people with unique skills experience and backgrounds so please apply and come as you are!
We also recognise the importance of flexible working and support this wherever we can. We welcome the opportunity to discuss flexibility part-time working requirements and/or workplace adjustments with all our applicants.
Rowden is a Disability Confident Committed company and we actively encourage people with disabilities and health conditions to apply for our roles. Please let us know your requirements early on so that we can make sure you have everything you need up front to help make the recruitment process and experience as easy as possible.
Finally if you feel that you dont meet all the criteria included above but have transferable skills and relevant experience wed still love to hear from you!
Required Experience:
IC
Key Skills
- Industrial Maintenance
- Machining
- Mechanical Knowledge
- CNC
- Precision Measuring Instruments
- Schematics
- Maintenance
- Hydraulics
- Plastics Injection Molding
- Programmable Logic Controllers
- Manufacturing
- Troubleshooting
About Company
Rowden designs and builds systems, infrastructure, and applications to deliver mission advantage to those working to protect the security of the UK and its allies. We are setting a new standard in government technology provision: hyper-efficient engineering, better customer relationsh ... View more
