Description
We are seeking a Principal AI Engineer to lead the technical delivery of innovative AI solutions that address real-world transport challenges.
As a Principal AI Engineer at the Department for Transport, you will use your technical expertise to design, build, deploy, and maintain AI solutions, providing technical ownership through all phases of the product lifecycle.
Responsibilities:
- Lead the design, development, and deployment of impactful AI solutions, including classical ML and agentic/LLM-based systems
- Own projects end-to-end with minimal supervision, working with partners, internal teams, and external stakeholders
- Write and review high-quality, maintainable code using established software development practices and tools
- Deploy and manage products across development, test, and production environments on cloud platforms (DfT uses GCP)
- Build responsibly by applying statistical rigour to design and implement evaluation frameworks, datasets, and metrics
- Present, communicate, and disseminate products and findings
- Stay abreast of developments in research and industry, finding innovative ways to apply them to improve our products and ways of working
Requirements:
- Experience of leading the end-to-end technical delivery of impactful AI or data science products
- Programming and software engineering skills to design and develop high-quality, scalable, and maintainable solutions
- Experience of deploying and managing products across development, test, and production environments on cloud platforms
- Applying a range of AI technologies, such as LLMs, VLMs, RAG, Agents, MCP, computer vision, GraphML, recommendation systems, or reinforcement learning
- Collaborating across multidisciplinary teams, translating organisational priorities into technical solutions, and communicating complex information effectively
Benefits:
- Employer pension contribution of 28.97% of your salary
- 25 days annual leave, increasing by 1 day each year of service (up to a maximum of 30 days annual leave)
- Flexible working options to encourage a great work-life balance