Optimisation Engineer

Senior Optimisation Engineer | £650 - £850 | Outside IR35 Workforce Scheduling Greenfield Build We're partnering with a high-growth software company that is rebuilding the optimisation engine behind a market-leading workforce scheduling platform. This is not a maintenance role and it's not a traditional machine learning position. This is an opportunity to design and build a next-generation optimisation engine from the ground up, tackling complex workforce scheduling challenges involving labour rules, preferences, fairness, coverage, cost optimisation and demand-aware scheduling. The goal is ambitious: move beyond hand-crafted heuristics and create a scalable optimisation platform where schedule quality improves with more data, more usage and more compute. What you'll be doing: • Designing and implementing optimisation models for workforce scheduling and rostering • Evaluating and benchmarking different approaches including CP-SAT, MIP, constraint programming, large neighbourhood search and hybrid optimisation methods • Building systems that guarantee feasible schedules while continuously improving schedule quality • Developing production-grade optimisation services and APIs • Translating complex business rules, labour regulations and customer requirements into configurable optimisation models • Partnering with engineering, product and implementation teams to solve real-world scheduling problems at scale • Helping shape the long-term optimisation architecture and technical direction of a core product Your Profile • Commercial experience building and deploying optimisation systems • Strong background in operations research, optimisation, algorithms or applied mathematics • Expertise with solver technologies such as OR-Tools, CP-SAT, Gurobi, CPLEX, SCIP, CP Optimizer, OptaPlanner or similar • Strong software engineering skills, ideally in Python alongside Java, Kotlin, C# or C++ • Experience with scheduling, rostering, routing, planning or other combinatorial optimisation problems • Particularly relevant backgrounds include workforce scheduling, nurse rostering, airline crew scheduling, transport optimisation, vehicle routing, manufacturing planning and contact-centre workforce management.