Principal Machine Learning Engineer

📍 London (Hybrid) 📅 ASAP start for 3-6 months. 💰 Outside IR35 rate depending on experience We’re working with a high-growth SaaS AI platform building cutting-edge ML systems and deploying them at scale. They’re looking for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer to join their R&D function in a pure IC role. You'll need to be super technical, operating across research, large-scale training and production systems. 🔑The Role • Own and deliver complex ML R&D projects end-to-end • Design and optimise transformer-based models and modern ML architectures • Work across training, evaluation, optimisation and production deployment • Improve model performance, latency and scalability in real-world systems • Collaborate closely with engineering to productionise cutting-edge ML • Contribute as a technical authority through hands-on delivery 🎯 What We’re Looking For • Strong experience with modern ML systems and deep learning architectures • Hands-on experience with model training (ideally at scale) • Understanding of transformers, attention mechanisms and inference optimisation • Experience working on high-performance or large-scale ML systems • Strong software engineering fundamentals (Python, PyTorch, etc.) • Comfortable operating as a senior IC (not people management)