Senior AI Engineer (Autonomy & Machine Learning)

About the role

ALTEN, a global engineering and technology consultancy, is hiring a Senior AI Engineer (Autonomy & Machine Learning) in Bristol, Crawley or Glasgow on a hybrid basis. You will work in a multidisciplinary engineering team on defence and aerospace programmes, designing, building and deploying AI solutions across the full lifecycle, from early-stage experimentation to production in mission-critical environments.

Key responsibilities

• Design and develop AI and machine learning solutions to complex business and engineering challenges.
• Translate customer and stakeholder requirements into scalable AI architectures, technical designs and measurable outcomes.
• Develop, train, evaluate and optimise models in areas such as computer vision, NLP/LLMs, time-series analytics and autonomous systems.
• Build data processing, training and evaluation pipelines, including feature engineering, experiment tracking and model validation.
• Work with software, systems, cyber and data engineering teams to productionise AI and integrate it into operational systems.
• Champion responsible AI principles covering security, safety, explainability and regulatory requirements.
• Develop reusable AI components, frameworks and reference implementations, and support demos, bids, proofs of concept and customer workshops.

Required profile

• 5+ years of relevant experience and commercial AI/ML development experience.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Engineering, or a relevant technical military background with equivalent experience.
• Experience deploying machine learning solutions into operational environments.
• Willingness and eligibility to obtain SC security clearance; candidates must complete a Baseline Personnel Security Standard.
• Desirable: experience with MLOps tools, cloud AI platforms and containerisation, and proficiency in C++.

Required skills

• Python with AI/ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-Learn and Hugging Face.
• ROS2 and autonomy frameworks.
• CI/CD, testing, version control and code quality standards.
• Pandas, NumPy, SQL, FastAPI, ONNX or TorchScript.
• Desirable: MLOps, MLflow, Weights & Biases, AWS/Azure/GCP, Docker, explainable AI and adversarial robustness.

What we offer

• A personalised career path and mentoring.
• Diverse engineering projects across industries.
• Private medical insurance, cycle and tech scheme, employee assistance programme, life insurance and pension scheme.
• Social events and team building.
• Flexible working depending on the role.