AI/ML Engineer
BAE Systems9 hours ago
Preston, United Kingdom +2 moreSenior
Responsibilities
- Build and operate production LLM applications end to end, including retrieval logic, prompt design, orchestration, and APIs.
- Design RAG solutions with chunking, embeddings, vector indexing, retrieval filtering, and data-layer entitlement enforcement.
- Define evaluation sets and baselines, measure answer quality, and re-evaluate systems after prompt, model, or document changes.
- Industrialise experimental AI work through code review, refactoring, dependency management, reproducibility, and production serving.
- Own model and prompt tracking, registry, versioning, promotion, rollback, and consistency between training and inference in MLflow.
- Deploy and monitor AI inference services on OpenShift and Azure using GitLab CI/CD, including logging, alerting, and secrets management.
- Monitor answer quality, drift, latency, and cost; investigate regressions and trace cost changes to prompt or model updates.
- Implement AI governance and guardrails, including model admission, provenance, responsible AI controls, and deployment auditability.
Requirements
- Demonstrable experience developing, deploying, and operating production machine learning and AI solutions rather than only proof-of-concept work.
- Hands-on Python experience building LLM and RAG applications, including frameworks such as LangChain and methods for diagnosing and improving underperforming RAG systems.
- Practical experience with vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval-quality evaluation, such as Qdrant or Azure AI Search.
- Experience monitoring live AI services for answer quality, drift, latency, and cost, including inference-cost attribution and AI monitoring or inference gateway tooling.
- Knowledge of Kubernetes or OpenShift, containerised deployment, GitLab or equivalent CI/CD, secrets management, Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki.
- Experience implementing AI governance and guardrails in regulated or security-conscious environments.
- Ability to work with data scientists, data engineers, platform engineers, and business stakeholders.
- Applicants must achieve Baseline Personnel Security Standard; some roles may require higher national security vetting and UK residency history.
Benefits
- UK-wide location with hybrid and flexible working arrangements, subject to role-specific options.
- Lifelong learning, meaningful work, and opportunities to grow the role or specialise within a new AI capability.
- Rewards and support for financial and personal wellbeing, with a balanced lifestyle and inclusive workplace culture.
- The role contributes to defence, aerospace, and security solutions with opportunities to shape a new AI ecosystem.
Tech Stack
Categories
About BAE Systems
BAE Systems is a public defense and aerospace manufacturer that designs and builds military aircraft, submarines, combat vehicles, electronic systems, and cyber/intelligence solutions for governments and defense agencies worldwide. Headquartered in London and listed on the London Stock Exchange, it was formed in 1999 from the merger of British Aerospace and Marconi Electronic Systems, and operates in more than 40 countries.