Lead ML Engineer

Harnham - Data and Analytics Recruitment
Manchester, United Kingdom
Last week
£80,000 – £90,000 pa

Salary

£80,000 – £90,000 pa

Job Type
Contract
Work Pattern
Full-time
Work Location
Remote
Seniority
Lead
Education
Degree
Contract Duration
12 months
Posted
18 May 2026 (Last week)

Benefits

Excellent work life balance Supportive, collaborative culture Potential for permanent role Future people leadership opportunities

Lead Machine Learning Engineer 12 Month FTC

Remote UK, up to £ month fixed term contract

This is a rare opportunity to take ownership of machine learning delivery in a business that is actively investing in AI and moving from proof of concept into production. You will play a pivotal role in shaping how advanced ML and generative AI solutions are engineered, deployed and scaled, with genuine scope for the role to become permanent.

The Company

They are a large, well established UK organisation operating in a highly regulated, information rich environment. With thousands of colleagues nationwide, they combine deep domain expertise with a strong focus on people, quality and long term outcomes. Data and AI are now a strategic priority, with senior backing to build robust, production grade ML capability.

The Role

  • Lead the engineering and productionisation of machine learning and generative AI solutions.
  • Build and operate end to end ML pipelines, including data preparation, model deployment, monitoring and governance.
  • Work closely with data scientists and data engineers to turn experiments and POCs into scalable, reliable services.
  • Develop solutions for large scale unstructured data, including complex document processing and LLM ready data pipelines.
  • Own MLOps practices, covering CI/CD, model serving, observability and lifecycle management.
  • Provide hands on technical leadership, contributing to architecture decisions and best practice.
  • Act as a delivery focused partner to stakeholders, confidently explaining trade offs and recommendations.

Your Skills & Experience

  • Strong commercial experience as an ML Engineer or MLOps focused engineer, ideally with a software engineering background.
  • Proven ability to deploy, operate and maintain machine learning systems in production.
  • Hands on experience with cloud based data and ML platforms, particularly on Azure.
  • Solid knowledge of Databricks and modern data engineering concepts such as lakehouse architectures.
  • Experience preparing data and pipelines for LLM based use cases and NLP workloads.
  • Strong Python skills, with experience building APIs or services, for example using FastAPI.
  • Confidence working across the full delivery lifecycle, from design through to monitoring and optimisation.
  • Clear communication skills and comfort working directly with non technical stakeholders.

What They Offer

  • Excellent work life balance and a supportive, collaborative culture.
  • The chance to shape ML engineering standards and capability from the ground up.
  • Strong potential for the role to become permanent, with future people leadership opportunities.

How to Apply

If you are an experienced ML Engineer looking for a hands on role with real influence and long term potential, apply now to find out more.

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Industry Insights

Discover insightful articles, industry insights, expert tips, and curated resources.

Where to Advertise Machine Learning Jobs in the UK (2026 Guide)

Where to advertise machine learning jobs UK in 2026: the specialist boards and communities that reach ML, MLOps and deep learning engineering talent. The candidate pool is small, highly specialised and in demand across AI labs, financial services, healthcare, autonomous systems and consumer technology simultaneously. Machine learning engineers and researchers move between roles through professional networks, conference communities and specialist platforms — not general job boards where ML roles compete with unrelated software engineering positions for the same audience. This guide, published by MachineLearningJobs.co.uk, covers where to advertise machine learning roles in the UK in 2026, how the main platforms compare, what employers should expect to pay, and what the data says about hiring across different role types.