AI Engineer

CyberNorth; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Scrumconnect Consulting is seeking an AI Engineer to implement the application-level AI capability within a large-scale AI adoption programme for a central government department. You will work on turning LLMs, retrieval systems, and agentic workflows into usable features that integrate with the department’s services.

You will collaborate in a Rainbow Team with civil servants, implementing the guardrails and standards set by the Lead AI Engineer and Lead Technical Architect.

Qualifications

• Experience building applications using LLMs or foundation models via API or self-hosted.
• Experience with RAG architectures, vector databases, and embedding-based retrieval.
• Strong Python programming and API design/integration skills.
• Prompt engineering with an evaluation-driven approach.
• Familiarity with agentic/orchestration frameworks and multi-step AI workflows.
• Ability to work in secure, regulated environments and handle sensitive data.
• Experience delivering digital services within UK central government or the wider public sector.
• Familiarity with GOV.UK Service Standard expectations.
• Exposure to open-source LLM tooling or communities.
• Familiarity with AI/ML tooling on AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Responsibilities

• Build & Integrate Implement RAG pipelines, prompt templates, and agentic workflows, and wire them into application logic that connects with legacy and multi-cloud systems.
• Prompt Engineering & Evaluation Design, test, and iterate on prompts and retrieval strategies; run structured evaluations to track answer quality and retrieval accuracy.
• Responsible AI in Practice Implement the guardrails and human-in-the-loop checkpoints defined by leads — execution role, not policy setting.
• Documentation & Handover Contribute to Docs-as-Code artifacts supporting the OKUA knowledge-transfer framework for maintainability.

Skills

LLMs / Foundation Models

RAG architectures

Vector databases

Python

API design / integration

Prompt engineering

Agent orchestration / workflows

Secure gov/public sector experience

GOV.UK Service Standard familiarity

Open-source LLM tooling

AWS

Azure

GCP

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Self-hosted deployment

Job description

Scrumconnect Consulting is a multi-award-winning digital consultancy, recognised for

delivering impactful and innovative technology solutions across UK government

departments. Our work has positively influenced the lives of over 40 million UK citizens.

Overview

We’re looking for an AI Engineer to build the application-level AI capability inside a large-scale AI adoption programme for a central government department. Where the Machine Learning Engineer trains models and the MLOps Engineer runs the platform, you sit closest to the end product: turning LLMs, retrieval systems, and agentic workflows into working, usable features that integrate with the department’s existing services.

You’ll work inside a collaborative “Rainbow Team” alongside civil servants, implementing the guardrails and standards set by the Lead AI Engineer and Lead Technical Architect.

Key Responsibilities

• Build & Integrate Implement RAG pipelines, prompt templates, and agentic workflows, and wire them into application logic that connects with the department’s legacy and multi-cloud systems.
• Prompt Engineering & Evaluation Design, test, and iterate on prompts and retrieval strategies; run structured evaluations to track answer quality, retrieval accuracy, and hallucination rate over time.
• Responsible AI in Practice Implement the specific guardrails and human-in-the-loop checkpoints defined by the leads — this is an execution role, not a policy-setting one.
• Documentation & Handover Contribute to “Docs-as-Code” artifacts supporting the OKUA knowledge-transfer framework, so the features you build can be understood and maintained by internal government engineers.

Required Skills & Experience

• Practical experience building applications using LLMs or other foundation models, via API or self-hosted
• Experience with RAG architectures, vector databases, and embedding-based retrieval
• Solid general-purpose programming (commonly Python) and API design/integration skills
• Prompt engineering with a systematic, evaluation-driven approach rather than trial and error
• Familiarity with agentic/orchestration frameworks and multi-step AI workflows
• Comfortable working within secure, regulated environments and handling sensitive data appropriately
• Experience delivering digital services within UK central government or the wider public sector
• Familiarity with GOV.UK Service Standard expectations
• Exposure to open-source LLM tooling or communities
• Familiarity with AI/ML tooling on AWS, Azure, or GCP