AI Engineer

Project overview

Applied AI Engineer (FDE)

Inside IR35: £600 - £650 p/d

Active SC Required

Initially till March 2027, rolling extensions expected

Primarily remote, occasional travel to London

Get hands-on with the latest frontier models and put them to work defending government systems.

You'll join a central government cyber security team taking an AI code-scanning pilot that's already delivering results and turning it into a live product. This is a forward-deployed, build-it-yourself role.

Responsibilities

What you'll bring

Bonus points: security tooling (Semgrep, Trivy, Gitleaks, CodeQL), detection rules (Sigma, KQL, SPL), GitHub Actions, or model gateways such as LiteLLM.

Good to know: you'll apply models, not train or fine-tune them.

• Build pipelines that put Claude, OpenAI and other models to work scanning code and spotting vulnerabilities
• Test, compare and evidence which model performs best for each use case
• Build data-driven model evaluation and routing across providers
• the best model for the job, no lock-in
• Use AI to speed up detection engineering: writing and testing the rules that spot threats
• Help turn a proven pilot into a service other departments can use
• Active SC clearance (essential)
• Real experience building with LLM APIs
• Anthropic, OpenAI, Bedrock, Azure OpenAI or Vertex
• Strong Python, plus agents, tool calling and structured outputs
• An evidence-first mindset: you prove things work with data
• You're a self-starter who's happy working independently in a multi-supplier team

Project details

• Start: ASAP
• Duration: 6 Months +
• Location: London, UK, GB
• Rate: 75-81 EUR/h