Lead Machine Learning Engineer - £575 - Inside IR35 - London Hybrid

RecOps is partnered with a leading consultancy to support an AI/Machine Learning project for one of their end clients in the insurance sector.

This role is £575 per day, inside IR35, and requires 1 day per week onsite in Central London.

Key Skills required:

• Strong experience as a Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Lead ML Engineer or Senior MLE with technical leadership experience.
• Excellent hands-on Python engineering skills, with strong fundamentals across OOP, async/concurrency, decorators, design patterns and production coding standards.
• Comfortable building and debugging Python systems without heavy reliance on AI tooling, frameworks or Internet-based support.
• Experience designing and building clean, well-tested, production-quality AI/ML systems from scratch.
• Strong experience with testing, validation, TDD and Python unit testing, ideally using pytest.
• Experience leading the deployment and life cycle management of ML/AI models in secure or restricted production environments.
• Strong GenAI/LLM experience, including RAG pipelines, embeddings, vector databases, agentic workflows and model evaluation.
• Ability to compare models and approaches, explain trade-offs, and choose the right model/architecture for the use case.
• Understanding of LLM application risks, including hallucination detection, output validation, prompt injection and jailbreak mitigation.
• Experience building automated ML pipelines across training, testing, deployment, monitoring and rollback.
• Strong understanding of MLOps, CI/CD, model versioning, experiment tracking and production observability.
• Good cloud, Docker and/or Kubernetes experience.
• Ability to lead technical direction while remaining hands-on with code, working closely with data scientists, software engineers, DevOps teams and stakeholders.

If the above sounds like you, please apply now for immediate consideration.