Optimisation Engineer

Senior Optimisation Engineer | £650 - £850 | Outside IR35

Workforce Scheduling

Greenfield Build

We're partnering with a high-growth software company that is rebuilding the optimisation engine behind a market-leading workforce scheduling platform.

This is not a maintenance role and it's not a traditional machine learning position. This is an opportunity to design and build a next-generation optimisation engine from the ground up, tackling complex workforce scheduling challenges involving labour rules, preferences, fairness, coverage, cost optimisation and demand-aware scheduling.

The goal is ambitious: move beyond hand-crafted heuristics and create a scalable optimisation platform where schedule quality improves with more data, more usage and more compute.

What you'll be doing:

• Designing and implementing optimisation models for workforce scheduling and rostering
• Evaluating and benchmarking different approaches including CP-SAT, MIP, constraint programming, large neighbourhood search and hybrid optimisation methods
• Building systems that guarantee feasible schedules while continuously improving schedule quality
• Developing production-grade optimisation services and APIs
• Translating complex business rules, labour regulations and customer requirements into configurable optimisation models
• Partnering with engineering, product and implementation teams to solve real-world scheduling problems at scale
• Helping shape the long-term optimisation architecture and technical direction of a core product

Your Profile

• Commercial experience building and deploying optimisation systems
• Strong background in operations research, optimisation, algorithms or applied mathematics
• Expertise with solver technologies such as OR-Tools, CP-SAT, Gurobi, CPLEX, SCIP, CP Optimizer, OptaPlanner or similar
• Strong software engineering skills, ideally in Python alongside Java, Kotlin, C# or C++
• Experience with scheduling, rostering, routing, planning or other combinatorial optimisation problems
• Particularly relevant backgrounds include workforce scheduling, nurse rostering, airline crew scheduling, transport optimisation, vehicle routing, manufacturing planning and contact-centre workforce management.