Senior Defence AI Engineer — Impact, Travel & Perks

Neptune North Ltd.; Newcastle upon Tyne; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days’ holiday

Pension contributions

Private health insurance

Discretionary bonus

Job summary

Neptune North in Newcastle upon Tyne is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to deliver AI-enabled defence applications and lead a growing engineering team. You will influence AI capabilities, work with clients to shape requirements and deliver high-quality technology across projects.

The role demands 5+ years delivering AI-enabled solutions, experience with LLMs, prompts, RAG systems, and production deployments.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years employment experience delivering and/or overseeing AI-enabled applications and workflows.
• Experience integrating AI components into applications and workflows, such as building Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems.
• Experience designing prompts and managing context for LLM applications.
• A solid understanding of LLM principles and transformer architectures, backed by core machine learning concepts and statistical methods.
• Practical experience evaluating LLMs and mitigating their weaknesses.
• Experience running AI applications in production, including monitoring and optimisation.
• Experience fine tuning or adapting models for specific scenarios, such as a specialist application or deployment to low power hardware.
• Experience building agentic systems, where models plan and act across several steps.

Responsibilities

• Influence the technical direction and play a key role in strengthening Neptune North’s AI capabilities.
• Provide leadership/hands-on delivery in a wide range of AI projects.
• Work directly with clients to shape requirements, manage expectations, and to build trust.
• Contribute to winning work by helping to write compelling bids and high-quality technical proposals.
• Advocate knowledge sharing across the team and identify opportunities for reuse of capabilities.
• Regularly provide career and technical mentorship to other engineers to build a high calibre team.
• Demonstrate flexibility in taking on work aligned to evolving company priorities.
• Remain up to date with the latest developments in AI and advise on nascent technologies in the field.

Skills

Python

LLM architectures

RAG systems

Prompt design

Production AI

Leadership

Communication

Ambiguity management

AI governance

Job description

Neptune North in Newcastle upon Tyne is seeking a Senior Applied AI Engineer to deliver AI-enabled defence applications and lead a growing engineering team. You will influence AI capabilities, work with clients to shape requirements and deliver high-quality technology across projects.

The role demands 5+ years delivering AI-enabled solutions, experience with LLMs, prompts, RAG systems, and production deployments.