Data Scientist/AI Engineer

Job Title: AI Engineer/Data Scientist
Location: Sheffield or Birmingham - 3 days per week in the office - only candidates within commutable distance will be considered by the client
Salary/Rate: £500 per day inside IR35
Start Date: 29/01/2026
Job Type: Contract - 6 months

Company Introduction
We have an exciting opportunity now available with one of our sector-leading financial services clients! They are currently looking for a skilled AI Engineer/Data Scientist to join their team for an initial 6-month contract.

Job Responsibilities/Objectives
The Onboarding and Know Your Customer Value Stream incorporates onboarding products, platforms, and a delivery capability particularly suited to client-aligned agile delivery at pace.
They are investing heavily across these domains with a strategic focus on increasing adoption of AI capabilities through our flagship AI journeys, day-to-day engineering and overall ways of working. To accelerate achieving our vision , we are seeking an experienced AI Engineer to join the Client Services and OBKYC Technology group.

1. Building production-ready models to drive content extraction and classification from images and text-based sources.
2. Working closely with business teams to understand requirements and iteratively design and develop solutions.
3. Collaborative with product managers, technical teams.
4. Create, test and iterate new and existing products and features.
5. Designing and building Python/ML/OCR-based components.
6. Not only supporting the development of the product, but also the full lifecycle including the deployment, testing and production support of the application.

Required Skills/Experience
The ideal candidate will have the following:

1. Strong experience in Document AI/Intelligent document processing using traditional models and Generative AI - particularly in using open source models for achieving business outcomes.
2. Experience delivering to production in Python, with a focus on machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, generative AI, image processing and OCR all additional positives.
3. Experience with some of the following frameworks - TensorFlow, Pytorch, Hugging face, Spacy, OpenCV, Regex or equivalents.
4. Experience delivering safe code to production, focusing on cybersecurity and resilience of the application and APIs.

Desirable Skills/Experience
Although not essential, the following skills are desired by the client:

1. Experience using PostgreSQL for data storage and management.
2. Proficiency with Azure core services like Azure Virtual Machines and experience with one or all of Azure CLI, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure DevOps
3. Experience delivering in teams releasing at a high cadence to production.