Mission freelance Data Scientist/Engineer

Our client is looking for a Data Scientist/Engineer to work on an initial 6 month Outside IR35 contract. The majority of the work would be onsite in Milton Keynes and candidates would require a DV Clearance prior to start.

Key Responsibilities

We are seeking an experienced, hands-on Senior Engineer with specialized skills working on developing applications and a flair for Generative AI and AI/LM technologies. The engineer will be responsible for:
* Quickly converting an idea to a demonstration
* Lead the design and development of Generative AI-based applications.
* Working within in a Scrum team to develop rapid prototypes.
* Evaluate, select, and integrate AI tools and frameworks that are essential for generative AI development.
* Stay up to date with the latest advancements in generative AI and contribute to our research efforts in this field.
* Learning, evaluating and leveraging a variety of AI tools and technologies.
* Being a self-starter and able to work independently, as well as within a team, to deliver a result.
* Provide guidance and mentorship to junior AI engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning.
* Demonstrate passion for quality and productivity by use of efficient development techniques, standards and guidelines.
* Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate ML and NLP models (including small/medium language models) using robust experimentation practices, clear success metrics, and offline/online evaluation.
* Build and maintain data pipelines for ML (ingestion, validation, feature engineering, labeling) with reproducibility, lineage, and governance.
* Implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and hybrid search, including embeddings, vector stores, and re-ranking to improve quality and guardrails.
* Optimize LLM/SLM inference (quantization, distillation, batching, caching) for latency, throughput, and cost; select and tune serving stacks (e.g., vLLM/TGI/Triton) and GPU/CPU targets.
* Operationalize models with MLOps/AIOps best practices: CI/CD for models, model/version registries, feature stores, automated testing, canary/blue-green rollouts, A/B tests, and rollback strategies.
* Deploy, scale, and monitor models on Kubernetes (Helm, Rancher, AKS, K3S) and cloud AI platforms; instrument for observability (metrics, logs, traces), data/label drift, bias, hallucination and safety events.
* Implement security, compliance, and privacy-by-design for AI systems (PII handling, policy enforcement, content moderation, prompt/response safety, secret management).
* Partner with Data Engineering and Platform teams to ensure capacity planning, cost controls, and reliability (SLOs/SLIs) for model serving in production.


Due to the nature and urgency of this post, candidates holding or who have held high level security clearance in the past are most welcome to apply. Please note successful applicants will be required to be security cleared prior to appointment which can take up to a minimum 18 weeks. LA International is a HMG approved ICT Recruitment and Project Solutions Consultancy, operating globally from the largest single site in the UK as an IT Consultancy or as an Employment Business & Agency depending upon the precise nature of the work, for security cleared jobs or non-clearance vacancies, LA International welcome applications from all sections of the community and from people with diverse experience and backgrounds.

Award Winning LA International, winner of the Recruiter Awards for Excellence, Best IT Recruitment Company, Best Public Sector Recruitment Company and overall Gold Award winner, has now secured the most prestigious business award that any business can receive, The Queens Award for Enterprise: International Trade, for the second consecutive period.