Lead Applied AI Engineer (i.AI)

Government must seize the opportunity of AI to drive outcomes in the public interest. This is of critical importance now. Government needs innovation and must not sleep on the opportunity presented by AI to drive better services for taxpayers and citizens. In November 2023, the creation of the incubator for AI (i.AI) was announced, and following early successes, the team was expanded in March 2024. Our mission is to harness the opportunity of AI to improve lives, drive growth, and deliver better public services. This is an AI product team that focuses on delivery of technical solutions to public service challenges, responding to ministerial steers about priorities and driving impact out into departments from the centre. i.AI delivers high impact products and is mission-led, delivering value and innovation within government. We are able to move fast and build things, and are set up specifically to pivot quickly towards priority use cases, and re-use technologies for future impact. You can see more about our work on ai.gov.uk and on LinkedIn. We work in the open and our code can be found here: https://github.com/i-dot-ai The Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI) will be moving to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) to form part of the new digital centre of government. If offered the position, you will be onboarded to, and initially employed by, the Cabinet Office, but will move with us to DSIT under the machinery of government change. This is expected to happen in April 2025, but this date is subject to change. If shortlisted, the hiring panel will be happy to answer any questions you might have. You're also welcome to reach out to us at i-dot-ai-recruitment@cabinetoffice.gov.uk Our team is based across Bristol, Manchester and London, and we work in a hybrid manner as default. A minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace, although requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance. We will consider part-time and flexible working arrangements - we encourage you to discuss your needs with the hiring manager if you are offered the role. We are looking for a talented, product-orientated engineer with proven delivery experience to join our team building the future of critical government AI-powered products. In this role you will work closely with researchers, engineers, designers and product leaders to build AI products that have an impact on real-world, citizen changing problems. You will be focussed on bringing together all of the technical elements needed to develop and deploy products, delivering against robust metrics that you help define. Role Responsibilities

• The overall technical direction of one or more projects. These could be fully-fledged internal applications the incubator is building. Alternatively, they might be services we're building in collaboration with other departments, where we work closely with technical counterparts. In practice, you are likely to be writing and reviewing code daily.
• Ensuring that the members of your technical team are delivering to the best of their ability at all times, ensuring continued investment in the project and in their own skills.
• Planning, sequencing and delivering technical work across the entire stack, from infrastructure (supported by the i.AI infrastructure team) to CI/CD pipelines, databases, backend frameworks, APIs and user interfaces, with appropriate levels of static analysis and automated testing to ensure quality and consistency.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including researchers, product managers and senior stakeholders to quickly understand customer needs and translate them into pragmatic technical solutions leveraging AI.
• Lead the design and establishment of frameworks, tools and processes to responsibly develop, deploy and monitor AI products.
• Evangelise best practices in applied AI across government.