MLOps Engineer

checkatrade; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Annual bonus & equity

Health & wellbeing

Gym membership

Cycle scheme

Holiday buy/sell

Charity leave

Job summary

Checkatrade is seeking an experienced MLOps Engineer to own how machine learning and AI run in production. You will translate Data Scientists' models into live, reliable services and build secure foundations for AI tools and agents to use our data.

You will report to the Head of Data Engineering, collaborating with engineers and data scientists across platforms, ensuring reliability, security and cost control in a hybrid London-based role.

Qualifications

• Strong Python, with production deployment and monitoring experience.
• GCP experience with ML/data services.
• Docker and Kubernetes, plus CI/CD and IaC.
• Observability for ML/data systems: metrics and alerting.
• Security-minded data access and secrets management.
• Ownership of production systems and collaboration with DS/engineers.

Responsibilities

• Deploy, automate, monitor and retrain ML models, aiming for near real-time refresh where valuable.
• Set MLOps standards: CI/CD, model versioning and reusable patterns.
• Build infra to let AI tools access data securely.
• Keep GCP-based data platform reliable and secure; reduce debt.
• Monitor models, pipelines and platform services to catch drift and cost issues early.
• Apply controls to ML workloads, including data access lineage and reproducibility.

Skills

Python

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Observability

Tools

AWS MWAA

Airflow

Job description

MLOps Engineer

Powering Great Work

We started as the place to find a trusted trade. Now, as we shape the future of home improvement, we're building the tech to transform that landscape for everyone - better products, smarter data, AI where it actually helps - so trades can spend less time on admin and consumers can find someone they trust, first time. That's Powering Great Work, and it's why every team here exists:

Trades spend less time on admin and more on winning work and growing their business

Homeowners get a trusted trade, first time, every time

We get to build products that change homes and lives across the country

As our next MLOps Engineer, you'll own how machine learning and AI run in production at Checkatrade. You'll turn our Data Scientists' models into live, reliable services, and build the secure foundations that let AI tools and agents use our data. You'll report to the Head of Data Engineering, in Barcelona (on-site) or London (hybrid).

The job, unfiltered

• Deploy, automate, monitor and retrain ML models, moving refresh frequency towards real-time where it adds value.
• Set the MLOps standards for the Data Science team: CI/CD, model versioning and reusable patterns that save everyone reinventing the wheel.
• Build the infrastructure that lets AI tools and agents (including Claude, MCP services and knowledge bases) access Checkatrade data securely.
• Help keep our GCP-based data platform (with some infrastructure in AWS) reliable and secure, and chip away at legacy and technical debt.
• Watch models, pipelines, AI usage and platform services, so drift, reliability and cost issues get caught early.
• Apply the right controls to ML and AI workloads, including sensitive-data access, lineage and reproducibility.

The fit:

• Strong Python, with proven experience deploying, serving and monitoring ML models in production.
• Hands-on experience with GCP and its ML and data services.
• Docker and Kubernetes, plus CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience building observability for ML or data systems: metrics, alerting and cost monitoring.
• A security-minded approach to data access and secrets management.
• You take ownership of production systems and care about them long after launch, and you work well with Data Scientists and engineers alike.
• You favour simple, maintainable solutions and raise the engineering bar around you.

Nice to have:

• Streaming or event-driven systems for real-time inference.
• LLM and agent infrastructure (MCP, retrieval-augmented generation, vector stores).
• Feature stores, model registries and drift detection.
• AWS experience, particularly managed Airflow (MWAA).

What you get

• Competitive salary, annual bonus & equity scheme
• Health, wellbeing and learning support
• Gym membership, Smart Tech Scheme, Cycle Scheme
• Birthday/special day leave, buy & sell holiday scheme
• 1 week's paid charity leave, and more

About us

We're Checkatrade - the UK's leading platform for finding a tradesperson. With more than 50,000 trades listed and over 6 million reviews, we help homeowners get jobs done right and help tradespeople grow their business. We're growing fast, with big plans to become the go-to brand for home improvements. If you care about great work, take pride in the details, and want to make an impact, you'll fit right in.