Lead MLOps Engineer - Outside IR35

This is an exciting contract opportunity for a Lead MLOps Engineer to join an experienced team in a new customer engagement working at the forefront of data analytics and AI. This role offers the chance to take a key role in the design and delivery of advanced AI solutions within the Azure ecosystem. Key Responsibilities: • Provide technical leadership across the platform team, aligning engineering solutions with client requirements and long-term platform strategy. • Design and implement Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations that connect LLMs with internal tools, APIs, and data sources while maintaining reliability, security, and low operational overhead. • Architect and develop production-grade Python systems, ensuring strong standards for performance, testing, maintainability, and observability. • Lead the design and implementation of the organisation's MLOps framework, supporting model development, deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management. • Drive architecture and system design decisions across the AI platform stack, establishing patterns and standards for how AI-powered capabilities are built and integrated. • Work closely with machine learning engineers, data engineers, and product teams to translate requirements into scalable, maintainable solutions. • Build and maintain systems running in containerised and microservice-based environments, ensuring reliability and operational robustness. • Mentor and support engineers across the team, contributing through code reviews, design discussions, and hands-on collaboration. Skills and Experiences: • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering production systems. • Deep expertise in Python, including software architecture, packaging, testing, asynchronous programming, and production deployment practices. • Strong C++ development experience in professional environments, including writing performant and memory-safe code. • Experience building lightweight tool or API integrations, such as MCP implementations, context providers, tool servers, or plugin-style architectures for LLM-driven systems. • Experience developing and operating containerised applications and microservices in production environments. • Hands-on experience with Databricks, including components such as Delta Lake, clusters, Unity Catalog, asset bundles, and familiarity with Mosaic AI capabilities (e.g., MLflow, DBRX, model serving, or LLM fine-tuning). • Strong system design and architectural thinking, including designing resilient systems, defining interfaces, and anticipating failure modes. • Deep understanding of software engineering paradigms such as object-oriented, functional, event-driven, and reactive programming, with the ability to apply the right paradigm to the problem. • Demonstrated experience implementing and evaluating software design patterns (creational, structural, behavioural) in production codebases. • Previous experience operating in a technical leadership role, such as Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or Tech Lead. Additional Information • Rate offered: Up to £625 per day • IR35 Status: Outside • Location: Fully remote • Start date: ASAP • Duration: 3 months initial sign up with significant opportunity for extension