Senior Applied AI Engineer: Production AI & Client Impact

Scale; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Scale is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to own the AI behaviour of production systems for public sector clients, including agents, evaluations, and backend integration. You will lead the workstream and serve as the technical point of contact on live data performance.

Responsibilities include building production agents, designing evaluations, and guiding tooling and observability. Strong client-facing communication and on-premise considerations are valued.

Qualifications

• Backend engineering experience with AI/ML systems in production.
• Ownership of AI behaviour of a production system end to end.
• Hands-on evaluation design linking model behaviour to real-world outcomes.
• Ability to explain model behaviour and trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Practical knowledge handling regulated or sensitive data and auditability; on-premise deployment experience is valuable.
• Experience leading root-cause analysis on production AI/ML systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the AI layer of production systems for public sector clients, including agents, model integration, and backend services.
• Build production agents from established architectural patterns with reliable tool calling, guardrails, and observability.
• Select and adapt evaluation methods, and design new evaluations for client-specific risks.
• Apply context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, model adaptation, or inference optimisation.
• Investigate regressions, perform root-cause analysis, and implement preventative changes.
• Lead project planning for your workstream and manage client expectations on scope, risk, and delivery.
• Codify recurring client work into reusable tooling, evaluation components, or guidance for other engineers.
• Mentor engineers through code review, pairing, and delegated ownership.

Skills

Backend engineering

Production AI/ML

Client communication

Root-cause analysis

Auditability

On-premise deployment

Job description

Scale is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to own the AI behaviour of production systems for public sector clients, including agents, evaluations, and backend integration. You will lead the workstream and serve as the technical point of contact on live data performance.

Responsibilities include building production agents, designing evaluations, and guiding tooling and observability. Strong client-facing communication and on-premise considerations are valued.