Mission freelance Lead AI Engineer - AI Adoption & Governance - SC Clear - Remote

Lead AI Engineer - AI Adoption & Governance - Remote Working

Must have an Active SC Clearance

This is a technical influence role rather than a conventional people-management position, requiring strong stakeholder engagement across portfolios, suppliers and technology providers.

Lead AI Engineer - AI Adoption & Governance Responsibilities

Lead horizon scanning across the AI tooling landscape and translate emerging capabilities into practical opportunities.
Build and run agentic AI workflows and evaluate models, tools and engineering approaches.
Establish AI engineering standards, guardrails and reusable adoption patterns across the SDLC.
Embed with delivery teams to prove AI approaches within real production codebases.
Run structured proofs of value with clear hypotheses, baselines, success criteria and benefit measurement.
Build practitioner communities through coaching, targeted training, knowledge sharing and champions networks.
Engage suppliers and technology providers to identify reusable approaches and reduce fragmented adoption.
Resolve recurring adoption blockers across governance, tooling, data, security and commercial routes.
Advise where AI adoption should be constrained, paused or stopped due to security, quality or maintainability risks.

Lead AI Engineer - AI Adoption & Governance Skills and Experience

Strong hands-on agentic AI engineering experience, including agent workflows, model selection, prompt engineering and harness engineering.
Experience with agent-tool integration, reusable skills and instructions, and MCP server development.
Experience with AI coding and agent tooling such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex or Kiro.
Strong knowledge of applying AI across the SDLC, including test generation, code review, documentation, legacy comprehension and modernisation.
Experience defining AI standards, guardrails or engineering practices adopted across multiple teams.
Proven ability to influence across organisational boundaries without formal authority.
Experience engaging suppliers and technology providers.
Experience delivering coaching, targeted training or practitioner communities.
Software engineering experience within large-scale production environments would be advantageous.
AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, AI/MCP Gateways, model routing, authentication and cost optimisation experience would be beneficial.
Knowledge of AI evaluation techniques including eval harnesses, regression testing and LLM-as-judge would be advantageous.
Awareness of Secure by Design, DPIA and DPA requirements would be beneficial.

To apply, please send your CV by pressing the apply button.

Due to high volume of applications, only shortlisted CVs will be contacted.


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 a minimum 10 weeks. LA International is an award-winning partner of choice for many of the world's most influential companies and government organisations. Holding Enhanced Government Security Accreditation, we are recognised as the European market leader in the delivery of Security Cleared talent to organisations that demand the very highest levels of security, compliance and assurance.

An award-winning organisation, having secured the prestigious Queens Award for Enterprise: International Trade over multiple years. We are committed to fostering an inclusive, equitable and accessible workplace where everyone feels valued and supported. We welcome applications from all individuals, regardless of background or identity, and we encourage candidates who may not meet every listed requirement to still apply. If you require any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, please let us know and we will work with you to ensure a fair and accessible experience.

Please Note: If a high volume of applications is received, only candidates shortlisted will be contacted.