Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Job Title: Lead Machine Learning Engineer Job Type: Contract Location: London - 3 Days on site Day Rate: £700-£750 a day Outside IR35 Contract Length: 6 Months - Multi Year Roadmap Lead Machine Learning Engineer - Essential • Extensive hands-on experience building and deploying ML models in a cloud environment, with the majority on Azure. • Expert-level command of Azure Databricks — Unity Catalog, MLflow, Delta Lake, Databricks Workflows and Model Serving are not aspirations; they are daily tools. • Expert in Azure Foundry • Proficiency in Python and PySpark for data engineering and ML workloads; strong SQL for analytical and feature engineering tasks. • Track record of leading technical teams or acting as a senior IC in a high-complexity, regulated or sensitive data environment — public sector, defence, finance or healthcare strongly preferred. • Outstanding communication skills — written and verbal — with proven ability to engage technical peers and non-technical senior stakeholders with equal confidence. • Solid grounding in MLOps: CI/CD for ML, model monitoring, drift detection and automated retraining pipelines. • Clear grasp of responsible AI principles: fairness, explainability, transparency and regulatory compliance in AI systems operating in public contexts. Lead Machine Learning Engineer - Highly Desirable • Databricks Certified Machine Learning Professional or Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional. • Familiarity with Azure Machine Learning — managed pipelines, endpoints, and responsible AI tooling. • Experience with large language models (LLMs), Azure OpenAI Service, RAG architectures and prompt engineering patterns. • Understanding of Microsoft Fabric and its relationship to the Databricks Lakehouse. • Knowledge of UK public sector procurement, IR35 implications, and government digital/data standards (GDS, CDDO, DSIT AI framework). • Previous experience delivering within a consultancy or as a contractor on complex client engagements — you are comfortable representing a delivery partner and operating with autonomy from week one.