SC Cleared Machine Learning Engineer

Job Title: Machine Learning Engineer Location: Bristol / Hybrid (2-3 days on-site) Clearance Required: Active UK SC Clearance and British Citizen Day Rate: £600 Outside IR35 - 6 month contract The Role We are supporting our client in the defence sector to build next-generation systems that process complex, real-world visual data in real time. We need an ML Engineer who specializes in computer vision to help move models from experimental codebases into rugged, production-ready systems. You'll be working with everything from object detection and tracking to multi-spectral imaging, deploying models that operate reliably in high-stakes environments. What You'll Do • Build & Optimize: Design, train, and deploy deep learning models for object detection, segmentation, and tracking. • Spatial Awareness: Implement and optimize SLAM algorithms to enable real-time mapping and localization for autonomous platforms. • Scale: Optimize computer vision pipelines to run efficiently on edge devices and constrained hardware. • Productionize: Wrap research-grade models into clean, maintainable, and scalable production code. What We're Looking For • Core Stack: Strong programming skills in Python and deep familiarity with PyTorch. • CV & Spatial Expertise: Hands-on experience building computer vision models and working with SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) frameworks. • Engineering Focus: Experience with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and writing production-grade code. • Must have prior experience in Defence or Government related work. • You must hold active SC clearance and be a British citizen. Nice to Have • Experience optimizing models for edge hardware (TensorRT, ONNX). • Familiarity with C++ for performance-critical vision and SLAM pipelines. • Experience handling synthetic data generation or working with imperfect, low-resolution datasets.