Senior Applied AI Engineer - Public Sector & MLOps Leader

scaleai; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Scale is seeking a Staff Applied AI Engineer to raise the bar for how AI is built, governed, and evaluated across the Global Public Sector team. You will define standards adopted by engineers, and act as the senior technical voice for the most sensitive AI decisions our clients face.

You will lead production AI systems design, governance, and incident resolution, while coaching engineers and shaping the technical roadmap.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of engineering experience with AI/ML in production.
• Experience judging the quality of training data and selecting adaptation methods.
• Experience owning an AI-powered product end to end, including AI behaviour.
• Track record of establishing standards such as evaluation methodologies or MLOps practices.
• Comfort operating with executive-level clients and leadership.
• Deep experience with regulated, sovereign, or on-premise AI deployment, including auditability.

Responsibilities

• Define standards for responsible AI, model governance, and production MLOps across the Global Public Sector team.
• Build or validate high-risk AI components and establish adaptable standards for other teams.
• Architect AI systems to prevent systemic failure and lead resolution of severe incidents.
• Build reusable AI capabilities—production-ready agents, fine-tuned models, evaluation methods.
• Advise on new AI developments worth adopting and help set the technical roadmap.
• Act as senior technical partner to client leadership on AI strategy.
• Coach Senior Applied AI Engineers and enable multiple teams to deliver safer AI.
• Contribute to recruiting and representing Scale's AI work externally.

Skills

AI/ML systems in production

Training data quality assessment

Model adaptation methods

Cost/latency/quality trade-offs

End-to-end AI product ownership

Establish technical standards

Executive-level client interaction

Regulated/on-prem AI deployment

Job description

Scale is seeking a Staff Applied AI Engineer to raise the bar for how AI is built, governed, and evaluated across the Global Public Sector team. You will define standards adopted by engineers, and act as the senior technical voice for the most sensitive AI decisions our clients face.

You will lead production AI systems design, governance, and incident resolution, while coaching engineers and shaping the technical roadmap.